Author: musicalitywrld

Noa started in music as a toddler and went on to study at Julliard – but as you’ll learn in this conversation, that seemingly straight-line path to professional musician success suddenly paused at that point and took a fascinating new direction which led to Noa’s success today as a respected expert in the psychology of performance in music.

In this conversation we talk about:

• The connection between “practice mode” and “performance mode”.
• What you should be thinking about during a performance.
• The third area alongside practice and performing where Noa gained new insights that transformed his enjoyment of his musical life.

The team here at Musical U, we are all massive fans of The Bulletproof Musician and we’re often resharing Noa’s articles and episodes, so we’ve been really looking forward to having him join us here on the podcast and it lived up to all expectations.

There are a ton of potential mindset breakthroughs waiting for you in this episode – enjoy! And don’t forget we love to hear from you at musicalitypodcast.com/hello any time you particularly enjoy an episode or have thoughts to share. So do let me know what you thought of this one, at muscialitypodcast.com/hello

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Links and Resources

• The Bulletproof Musician
• TED Talk: How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff – without ropes, by Alex Honnold
• TED Talk: The transformative power of classical music, with Benjamin Zander
• Full interview with Shawn Johnson on Freakonomics
• This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin
• Interview with Mark Kosower, principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra
• “Beyond Practicing” course

Transcript

Noa: This is Noa Kageyama, from the Bulletproof Musician, and you’re listening to the Musicality Podcast.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Noa, thank you for joining us today.

Noa: Thank you for having me.

Christopher: So, I believe you were fairly seriously into music from a young age, is that right?

Noa: Yeah, I started when I was two and a half. I went to my first Suzuki camp in Ithaca, New York. My cousins had already been starting Suzuki, and so they had some small violins lying around, and as the story goes it was my idea, like I ran around the house saying “oa wike mugas”, and once my parents figured out what I was saying, it’s like, “Oh, well why don’t we just go visit the cousins and have you do something over the summer.” And so I did, and you know at two and a half, pretty much all I learned that first summer was how to bow, I think to a D major chord, is what they use by default.

So, it wasn’t a particularly auspicious beginning, and even for a couple of years after that I’d spend a lot of time in lessons just kind of lying on the ground, and talking about the carpet, and to make conversation about completely irrelevant things, and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do. But, then I think I saw another student’s lesson, and I was like, “Oh. That’s what you’re supposed to do.” So then I kind of picked up, and my mom is from Japan, and she was reading Dr. Suzuki’s books, and his philosophy and so when I was in kindergarten she took me out of school and we flew over to Japan and studied with them for about half a year.

So yes, from about the time I was four or five, it started getting to be a pretty big part of my life, and continued on that way. Honestly, until I got to college, I mean I was … we’re driving from central Ohio to Chicago on the weekend for lessons, and all my lessons were at least 45 minutes or an hour, two hours away. One point I had four different teachers, all at the same time, and three different cities, and flying to New York on the weekends, and high school for pre college at Juilliard, and so you know this is presumably what I was going to do for my life, and it was pretty central to everything.

My life revolved around it, my parents lives kind of ended up revolving around it. So yeah, then I got to college and I still assumed that I would be a musician when I grew up, but in hindsight I guess it makes sense, I ended up wanting to get out of orchestra. I didn’t want to sit there a couple of times a week, working on the same repertoire for all semester, because I’d been going to the Aspen Music Festival for my summers, and there it was a completely new set of repertoire every week. So, you know in nine weeks we’d go through nine different programs. It’s like, This is awesome.”

And the idea of spending a whole semester working on one program, just kind of made me die a little bit inside, si I mean that’s normal for college systems. I mean, you can’t get through repertoire that quickly, but yeah, so I found a loophole that I exploited, where basically I pretended to do the double degree program so I could keep taking lessons and doing chamber music and keep my scholarship, but then really only took classes in the college. And so, when I was done,

I graduated with my college degree and went to Juilliard, presumably to continue my path towards being a musician, but then when I got there, I hadn’t really spent all my time being a musician, you know like my friends were there, and I hung out with them, but I only hung out with them like in nine week chunks out of a year. I didn’t know what it looked like the rest of the year, and so to be around people who really truly loved music and wanted to be in music for their lives was a new experience, I suppose, in a way.

Christopher: Let’s pause there for a second then if you wouldn’t mind, and just talk a little bit about that journey for you, if it wasn’t what your contemporaries at Juilliard had been through. You mentioned you were starting off with the Suzuki method, for any listeners who aren’t familiar with that, could you just give kind of a nutshell summary of that approach, and what’s distinctive about it?

Noa: Sure. Well, this is kind of my memory of it and I’m probably not doing it justice, but the idea was Dr. Suzuki reasons that children don’t need to be taught how to speak their native language, but through trial and error and just listening all the time they kind of pick it up, in a more effective way than those of us who learn a second language later do, oftentimes, and so a central part of this, at least in my experience, was learning by listening.

So, my mom would buy these, they were called endless cassette tapes, like 20 minutes of a cassette tape that would play on a loop, and she’d just record whatever I was working on, on that tape, and then I would listen to it continuously throughout the day and then by the time I was even picking up instrument to play it, I’d kind of have it in my ears, if not to a degree even in my fingers, and you know parents are very much involved, and not in a pushy necessarily kind of way, although I guess it can become that way sometimes.

But, yeah so there’s a lot of parental involvement, there’s a lot of group classes there’s a lot of listening and playing, for me even there’s a good bit of improvisation at an early age, it’s kind of composing things on the spot. And so that was my memory of being a Suzuki kid.

Christopher: Interesting. And if it’s possible to look back that far, and be objective with your adult viewpoint, what would you say your motivation was like over those first 10 or 20 years, in terms of you know, was it your parents pushing you towards this career in music? Was it something you just felt drawn to do? Was it something where you saw the results of your practice, and it motivated you to achieve more and more? How were you thinking about music through that process?

Noa: I think for me I had started so young that it was just what I did, and things came relatively easy to me and one thing leads to another. And I never really stopped to question why I was doing what I was doing, it was just what my life looked like, and prepare for the next performance, or for the next lesson, for the next competition and that’s music festival, and certainly there are lots of moments where it was extremely gratifying and meaningful, in one way or another. But I just never really ask myself, is this what I truly want to spend my life focused on. Because obviously, there are some moments where I didn’t want to practice, lots of moment in fact where I didn’t want to practice, and it was like pulling teeth, and tough times and I had to give up a lot of things to be able to spend the time on music and so forth. But, for me, and this is not maybe the most compelling answer, but I just never thought about it. I just did it.

Christopher: I see, and you said something interesting there, which was that it came relatively easily to you, but at the same time, you said you were taking lessons with four different teachers at one point. You were travelling great distances, putting in a lot of hours. There was clearly a lot of hard work and grind involved in getting to Juilliard. Would you say when you arrived there, your kind of hard work and disciplined practice was typical, or were most of your contemporaries there fitting the mythology, or the story of someone who just kind of could do it and it didn’t have to think too hard or work too hard at it?

Noa: Well, I think it varies from person to person. I mean certainly some people have an easier time of certain things than others. But what kind of led to me actually starting to ask myself the question of do I want to do this or not, is that you know like I said, I did do a lot of work, even though it was a struggle sometimes to get myself to do that work and because in hindsight you know in comparison, doing a piece in psychology, actually was quite easy, relative to the work of becoming a musician. And so anything I think I would have to do is easy compared to what it is that I did all throughout my first 20 some years of my life.

Even though I really didn’t do as much as I could have I talked to any teacher that I ever studied with and they’ll say I don’t probably say that they wish I would have practiced more. So it’s something like my peers are certainly doing a lot more practicing than I was and so forth but so what. What ended up getting to me Juilliard, is that I realized that I had this ability to do things but not enough of the motivation and desire to really dig into it and get into the nuts and bolts and go the extra mile and so forth, and I realized that that was always going to frustrate me that there were people who were more talented less talented but they really wanted to be doing what they were doing. And I was looking for the first excuse to get out of it, or for a reason to stop and not go the extra mile.

And so when I started kind of seeing that I was like well OK. So this is gonna be a very frustrating career for me there. You know here where I’m not going to be able to get to the level playing that I know I can and I’m going to see other people who I don’t think have as many perhaps natural gifts but who because they want it so much and they love it and they enjoy spending time here are potentially going to start over the course of years of our careers really start getting to a higher and higher level of playing that I will probably feel I could get to but will never get to.

And I started seeing … because you know this frustration was always kind of there on some level, just like wow you know I can play better, but I’m not and I can’t seem to find a way to get myself to do what I need to do, and do what I know I need to do to get there. Then that’s when I started thinking, what you know does that mean maybe that I don’t actually want to do this. And so that’s what kind of led to that.

I was even having a conversation with some friends and a quartet was playing and we were talking about what we do if we won the lottery three of them immediately knew or had ideas on what they would do and they were all in music and I didn’t know what I would do, but I knew that it wouldn’t be a music, and so it’s like, huh, that’s so weird why would you say you don’t have to be a musician and why would you still do it. And essentially, they all wanted to, and I thought that was I thought I was normal thought that every musician you know, if you won the lottery you would not play music anymore and you know all these things came again. It’s like wow, that’s so weird. Maybe I should really think about this a little bit more.

Christopher: Yeah. That sounds like a bit of a spiritual crisis.

Noa: Right?

Christopher: So, how did you proceed from there, what did you do about this sense that you might not be on the right track after all?

Noa: Well, once I realized that I didn’t have to be a musician because I had this I had a girlfriend at the time is not my wife and we’ve been together since we were like 19, 20ish. So you know we went to college together and we kind of went from being kids. I think we’re still kind of like kids, we’re not fully adultish yet, but she, I think was already a big part of my life and said Yeah you know I like it’s fine. Like we kind of had this pact that we would both be musicians, she was pianist. So, she is a pianist, and she said, yeah, you know, but you don’t have to know that, like we’ll still be fine if you’re not a musician. We’ll be fine like whatever it is like it’ll be fine. And so I think that was actually hugely reassuring to me and freeing. It’s like, oh wow.

And it just kind of like … the world opened up and I was like wow, well if I could do a thing like how cool would that be? Like, I wouldn’t have to practice tomorrow, or next week or prepare for this thing or that thing. And then I talked to my parents, and there were silence on the phone at first, even though you know they weren’t like the pushy parents that I think some people have. It’s just that I think my mom’s perspective was, here’s this kid who seems to have some talent, or the teachers seem to suggest that he has the ability in this. I want to make sure that I do everything I can. so that my son has every opportunity that he has. And I think that was really kind of a central focus of making sure that I had every opportunity so she wouldn’t regret not having given me every possible advantage, teache, music festival and so forth.

And so I think that was her driving motivation and it didn’t really have to be the music. It’s just that’s the thing that I seem to be most naturally inclined to do. So you know after the silence passed she basically said Well don’t just quit without some other plan. But yeah there’s something that he really would rather do than it’s you know it’s your life you’re gonna have to live it long after we’re gone. So basically she kind of gave me the blessing to pursue other things and then at the time I was taking this performance psychology class with Don Green, sports psychologist, who was teaching at Juilliard. And that seemed kind of intriguing to me. And it’s not like the clouds parted and the choir of angels sang, it wasn’t that sort of a-ha moment, but it was this is cool. I wonder what happens if I follow this path a little bit longer?

Christopher: Nice. And what had your relationship to performing been like up to that point, when you were taking this course on performance psychology, where you’re coming into it thinking, “I can … Performance isn’t a big deal, this really necessary.” Or were you someone who’d struggled with that? Or how had performing been for you? Because you mentioned competitions and concerts and so on, you clearly had a lot of experience by this point.

Noa: I think I was probably in the normal range of things, like I wasn’t on the extreme end of things where I would break out into hives and have a panic attack backstage and you know throw up and say I wasn’t on the extreme end of things but I’d certainly had my share of panicky moments and and like freak outs and catastrophic moments on stage because the nerves and the shaky bow, and the memory slips and all that. And I’d also had good performances great days things going amazingly well better even than in lessons and practice and so forth. But the vast majority of my days were the frustratingly subpar ones where instead of you know I could live with it being like 80 90 percent of what I knew I could do. But when it’s like 60 percent like continue you know constantly consistently 60 percent and over the course of weeks months years and most performances are like having that 50 60 70 percent range you start wondering why that is. And especially when you’re nervous and things don’t feel good.

You start thinking, well that’s probably part of the equation and how can I get rid of that, and how can I find a way to have more of those good days, because the good days are awesome? You know, we’ve all had good days. And it’s like that’s so much more fun. It’s like the Adam Sandler movie, Happy Gilmore, where like he hits a hole in one, and it’s like, oh.Well that’s so much easier, why don’t I just hit all hole in ones, and just be done with it then. It’s kind of like that. So, yeah that’s what led me to be curious about this course, because I’d never heard of sports psychology, and you know back in the 90s, I think relatively few people had, and I didn’t know what that would entail I thought it was just kind of therapy for musicians but, it turned out not to be at all what I expected.

Christopher: And so, can you think back to anything in particular that caught your attention in that course? What was it that you were sharing that resonated with you?

Noa: Well, I think what really got to me is that that’s how concrete everything was, it wasn’t just, oh you know, imagine the audience in their underwear or it wasn’t just it’s like evaluating why you care so much about what other people think and how can you change your mindset and reframe things. It wasn’t … I mean there’s certainly some of that which can be really helpful but a lot of it was very concrete drills and exercises and things that we had to practice skills that we had to develop like the like. Even little things like you know I would just practice, I wouldn’t be particularly aware of the thoughts going through my mind as I was playing. But one of the things we have to do is start monitoring, you know, what is that internal dialogue like? Like are we being constructive and kind of talking to ourselves as a teacher, or coach would?y where it’s things like okay, that note seems to be consistently flat.

You know ,what’s going on with your thumb? What’s going on with your elbow?. It may be a matter of you know the frame of your hand, or the shape of your fingers, is it maybe you’re holding on with your thumb a little bit too much before you shift your elbow around the instrument? Or maybe you’re pulling it around too late, or you’re not preparing your hand in advance. Just a split second too late so that’s why you end up brushing the shift and right so it’s kind of like breaking it down and running these little tiny experiments in your head. Okay, what happens if I release my thumb a fraction of a second sooner? What if I bring my elbow around before I release them? What happens if I get my hand shape in position for the note I’m arriving at instead of the note that I’m actually playing?

And testing all these things out, and finding out if that works or if it helps. Or you know am I instead of my head being like you know why can’t you play in tune like you’re never gonna get this like you suck like you know how are you going to you know why do you think you have any chance of winning this competition or you know. So as a critic in your head and the kind of doomsday scenarios playing out or is it like problem solving and that’s a little things like that I didn’t realize were part of what athletes do and what the coaches help them with and then even more concrete things like you know what should we be thinking about when we’re performing. Should we be thinking about, you know, mechanics and technique, or should we be thinking about how we want to shape the sound to come out of the instrument, or the shaping of the phrase? So, yeah. So I think a lot of it just surprised me by how practical it was.

Christopher: Fascinating. So, what you just talked through there, was a really interesting blend of performance mindset and practice technique, really. And those are, I think the two big themes that you specialize in, in your blog and your podcast the Bulletproof Musician, and it’s what musicians and music educators around the world know and respect you for, is your expertise on those two topics. But it might have surprised some people listening, to hear you move so fluidly between those two things, because I asked you about performance psychology, and actually we were getting into the nitty gritty there of fingering technique and trying out different things. So, how do you think about the relationship between practicing and performing?

Noa: It’s interesting, because I never really thought about them as being different things. I thought you just practice as much as you can and then you get on stage and see what happens, which of course is not … I mean now I know it’s not the most effective way to think of things but also even you know in my first couple decades of being a musician it’s kind of nerve racking to just go on stage cross your fingers and hope for the best and feel like oh that’s not good. Then I guess I should have practiced more. But there’s nothing you can do about that on the day of the performance even though I certainly tried to cram as much as I could in the hours that I did have so.

So now, looking back in hindsight and this is something that I think athletes again not much more deeply than the musicians too. There’s a diving coach Jeff Huber who coached a few Olympic teams and recently retired from the Indiana University diving program but now is in charge of education for USA Diving, and himself has a page in educational psychology, and he says that he often told his athletes that he just had two goals for them. One goal was to help them learn how to dive better. The other goal was to help them learn how to dive better in competition and that the two are seemingly you know there’s certainly a lot of overlap but those are two unique challenges that require different methods of preparation to be successful in teaching. So in that regard.

Because a position when we’re practicing effectively, we have to self monitor right you have to use your ears to listen really carefully to what’s coming out of your instrument, whether it’s intonation or sound or even rhythm and timing and pacing and so forth. So, we really need to cultivate our ears so that we can pick up on all these tiny details and imperfections and in one sense that we can stop make adjustments to the mechanics that produced those and see if we can find in the home the mechanics of producing sound, so that we get more what it is that we want, so we can say the things that we want to say through the sound that we produce.

So, they’re self-monitoring involved in that. There’s analysis mechanics critique judgment as is good or bad that I know so helpful. But it’s pretty natural for us to think in those terms all of which are useful for skill development and refinements and improvement. And if that stuff isn’t there then we tend to just kind of go through a trial and error. Method of improvement kind of on an implicit level where it’s like riding a bike he’s sort of figured out like you don’t actually know the mechanics of how to ride your bike and figure out just sort of trial and error your way to it.

And so when you look at people who are practicing kind of inefficiently that’s kind of how they practice and when like, if you look at younger kids, or even adults who haven’t really figured out how to practice it, they’re just kind of playing the same thing over and over and over, until it starts to sound better, but they’re not quite sure what they did differently to make it sound better. They just know that it kind of is better, and that’s … in talking to them, I’m sure Dr. Ericson or Jason Heim, and perhaps others, you’ve gotten a sense of how important it is to really stop, problem solve, analyze, and so. So, that’s that’s really essential for its development and that’s what actually makes practicing more fun because it gives you something to try and to think about so forth.

The problem with all that though, is when you take that same approach or mindset on stage you’re still keeping score like as each note goes by like that was flat that was sharp. That was my rushing. Like you’re analyzing, you’re critiquing, you’re judging, or you’re basically using the critic in your head primarily as you’re trying to perform, and you’re not using your ability to create and to shape things and to be spontaneous and to be improvisational and to kind of you know enjoy the interplay between you and the pianist or your other band mates onstage which is kind of the magic of performing not just for the audience, but for the musicians too.

I mean, trauma can be so much fun when you’re really in the moment and in creating so far so. So it’s a little bit more abstract I suppose to try to describe what performance looks like, but it’s I think really centered around creating and focusing on the sound that you want, as opposed to the sort of methodical planning and analysis and the slow deliberate process of problem solving, because if you try to problem solve on stage. I mean there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. It’s already happened constantly reacting to something you can’t do anything about anymore I see.

Christopher: I see. And I think if people have been listening to this show for a while they will have heard, as you say Professor Erickson or Jason Heim, talking about deliberate practice, and how that kind of framework can transform your experience of practice and the results you get. It was helpful to hear you talk just now about the mindset or the mental activity that can, and should, be going on for a good performance.

But is there anything kind of more concrete, or more tangible, we can think about on the performance side, any equivalent framework as it were to deliberate practice that can help someone actually feel like, “Yes. I am changing the way I approach performing in these five steps, or these six aspects.” Or is there anything you think about in those terms, when it comes to performing?

Noa: Yeah. So, this sounds sort of obvious and I think a lot of people who have stumbled into it and I think a lot of teachers have advocated for it and talked about it but I think the only difference is we don’t make it a deliberate focus of our performance mode practice. So there’s actually an interview that’s coming out I think a couple weekends with the principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra Mark Kosower. And we’re talking about you know what he thinks about when he’s performing and he’s someone you know. I’ve known him since we were maybe not even in high school but since high school we went to Aspen together and he’s always been to me, anyways just always seemed to be this natural performer, just everything came easy to him.

Like, I’ve never heard him play a note out of tune, which is maybe not true but it feels like it’s true that I’ve never heard him play another tune and sound just everything is he’s always been awesome. I mean somebody asked me who your favorite cellist is even from that I’d say Mark like just just awesome to listen to and so no surprise that he’s doing what he’s doing now and he’s had the career that he has. So you know but as kids I’m not going around as a music festival asking if you are what you think about when you thinking about that.

So, I never asked him and then a month or so ago, I finally asked, well yes, what do you think about when you’re performing? What’s going through your mind? And when you asked musicians it’s a lot of times they’ll say one of two things. So, either say nothing or they’ll say the music neither, which I think are particularly helpful because how do you think about nothing. And it’s also not true. That’s not true that they’re not nothing about it. I think if you really kind of dig further you’ll find out that the reason why it feels like nothing and that’s their sort of default answer is because it’s not verbal. They’re not saying oh do this now or do this now. It tends to be that they’re much more engaged and just processing sound so they’re thinking in terms of sound baby colors maybe images but it tends to be those sorts of things.

So, it feels like nothing. Or if they say they’re thinking about the music it’s that again it’s kind of too abstract to know exactly what that means, and so much case he says that you know on a good day he’s maybe monitoring what’s happening with about 15, 20 percent of his brain, like it’s sort of like hearing that’s used to do this to my mom all the time I’d be in a car she’d try to lecture me on this two hour drive after lesson and I’d hear words coming out of her mouth but I wasn’t really listening to anything that she was saying.

So, it’s sort of like that like you hear what’s happening just enough that you can make adjustments in the moment, but you’re not really listening to it on the other hand he said you know, primarily what he’s got going on in his head, is he’s conceiving of sound like he’s he’s creating sound it is the kind of sound that he wants what he’s going for and whether or not he gets it is also not part of the processing.

It’s just this is what I want. So, you know, this is what brass folks have talked about in the brass world. This idea of just focusing on creating sound in your head and continuously aiming for it and striving for it and then trusting your fingers your hands to do what they need to do. And if they don’t do what you need them to do you record yourself and practice and so forth, means you need to practice more and figure out how to make that habit strength a little stronger, so that you can fill your mind up to focus on what you want and trust your fingers to produce something in that neighborhood for you.

Christopher: Gotcha. So, you described two different ways, that if we call them the natural performers, think about performing or what’s going on in their head when they perform. Are those learnable attitudes? You know, can you train yourself to think about nothing or to think with only 15 to 20 percent of your mind, assuming you’ve put in the practice and you have the dexterity and the physical ability to play it well?

Noa: Yeah. And so, this is where for me it’s two parts one it’s identifying what exactly do I need to think about when I’m performing for some. Some people really focus like Julie Landsman horn player who recently retired from the Met for her a lot of her internal processing while performing is rooted in subdivisions they’re kind of counting not counting numbers necessarily but feeling this pulse internally in her head you know for markets creating sound and it’s a lot of other people to screen sound. And actually, there’s this great Freakonomics podcast episode, with gymnast Shawn Johnson, who and she was talking at one point about how important it was for her to have not just the physical choreography of her routine but the mental scripts or the mental choreography or the routine as well, so that her brain didn’t have the ability to go and think thoughts that would potentially sabotage your performance.

She needed to know exactly what to think about each second of a routine. So, 90 seconds, so she needed to script that 90 seconds mentally, as well, so that her brain didn’t have an opportunity to go off and sabotage her performance. And so for musicians to anytime you’re doing a run through every time you have a lesson any time you’re playing for other people or recording yourself. The idea is to practice making that that switch from practice mode where you’re self-monitoring and critiquing, to performance mode where you’re not listening to mistakes and you’re you’re practicing focusing on the things that you know in a performance are going to be most helpful to you. And over time that becomes a tangible feel you can feel yourself flipping a switch from practice mode where you care about mistakes to performance mode where you can’t afford to.

And it’s fun actually, it’s scary at first, and it feels uncomfortable and doesn’t feel right. But when you get used to it I mean that’s how you get into the zone more consistently and have those performance experiences that are gratifying and feel like you’re flying in time stands still and so forth. And also the audience responds better. So, it’s kind of a win, win. Except that it’s really scary to do that unless you’ve practiced it and feel comfortable and can trust that things are gonna go fine. If you flip that switch and if in fact they’re going to go better.

Christopher: That’s super interesting. You know, often people talk in terms of autopilot, when discussing, you know, how to make performances successful and you need to practice till the point where your fingers just automatically do what they mean to. But, I think hearing you talk through it there, what was most interesting, was that there is still an active, conscious effort, being applied there. You know, you might be on autopilot, in some sense with your fingers doing what they’ve been trained to do, but you are still choreographing your thoughts, or you’re still paying attention to shaping the sound, or you’re still focusing on the moment, and how you’re bringing that autopilot into the world.

And I think that’s a subtlety that’s often missed out on, and as you say there, if you’re purely thinking in terms of, “I practice until it’s autopilot, and then I just step up on stage”, that performance is still pretty terrifying. Right? Because you don’t know if you’re autopilots going to work. So, I think it’s super interesting that there are practical things that you can do to make sure your prepared autopilot, turns into a really powerful performance.

Noa: I think if it as semi-autopilot and you know I’m as excited as anybody about the day when I don’t have to drive a car and I can just let it drive me where I want it to go but we don’t. So yes. So I think of it … it’s on my part autopilot, the sense that we have cruise control now and that’s essential I think what our goal is for onstage. You know we trust the muscles to do what we’ve trained them to do. If they don’t do that we should already know, because we will have tested it out in mock performances and so forth beforehand and then can go and practice. But you know, we trust the muscles to do their thing but we never want to put our mind on autopilot because if we put our mind on autopilot, that means our brain is going to think of all sorts of brand. It’s going to think about what we should have on the pizza, what we’re going to have after the performance, it’s going to think about people in the audience and what they’re thinking and what they’re doing.

And we’re going to be thinking about mistakes, that just happen. We’re going to be thinking about what are our colleagues on stage think about what we just did. We’re going to worry about difficult section. Coming up we’re going to worry about memory slips and so yeah, that’s the unfortunate thing is we can unfortunately never put our mind on autopilot. We always have to be kind of in control sort of like you know some of these unfortunate accident to read about where people didn’t have their hands on the steering wheel that kind of trusted the car to do too much for them. And it didn’t. And so, yeah, we always want to have our metaphorical hands on the steering wheel and guiding where we want each phrase to go in our mind. But but then trusting your muscles to do the job for us.

Christopher: Nice. So, another area where this interplay of kind of physical practice and mental activity, and mental exercises comes out, is the idea of mental practice, and this is something I managed to get through, probably 15 years of music education without ever being told about or hearing any mention of. And then I read a book called, I think, “Fundamentals of Piano Practice”, which talked about mental play and using this technique to imagine yourself playing, and you know it’s something we’ve covered more recently at Musical U, in terms of ordination and combining that with the visualization of what you’re doing, and it’s a super fascinating technique that I think isn’t talked about enough, and you had a lovely post on your blog, particularly looking at how effective mental practice is.

So, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that, how you can use the kind of self-aware, mental control, that we’ve just been talking about from a performance perspective, but for the actual practice of bringing your repertoire up to standard, or whatever it is you’re working on in music?

Noa: Yeah, you know… and this is something that I think my mom was always very aware of the psychology. I think she says that she took some psychology classes in college and so forth, so she herself when she was teaching she taught Japanese words, kind of envision a successful class before teaching. She would envision meeting people and then being excited about what she was teaching them etc. and so she had me do, I think in line with this is your key listening. She would have not just listened but she would have me imagine myself being the one who is playing whatever it is that I was listening to. So, where my fingers would go like how my bow would be.

And I think that’s how I started, because I remember even being young enough that my mom would make me take a nap before a performance and she’d have me you know as I was lying down to go to sleep imagine myself on stage in the venue playing what the recording is producing and I think of that as assisted visualization because sometimes for folks it can be difficult to create all the details in their head because ideally you want to be able to hear what you want obviously you want to be able to feel the muscle movements and the kinesthetic element of the experience of playing and then even see what it is that you’ll be seeing as you play but maybe as a first step for some folks it can be helpful to just listen to recording that they enjoy of a piece and then with eyes closed or open whatever’s easiest just kind of imagine the motion of the piece and how it’s going to feel as a way of getting into visualization can even move a little bit.

It’s kind of like air guitar just kind of doesn’t have to be exact choreography but certainly can move around a little bit, which is a little bit of research on now recently which suggests that it can be helpful to not just be static, and sit there with your eyes closed but actually move around a little bit. The main thing I think that most people talk about with the visualization though, is that it be vivid and so the more details you can put in in terms of how the movements feel how the you know how your fingertips feel on the string as you shift from one position to the next. You know that the contact point between your bow and the strings, and feeling the rosin kind of give you that little bite like all these little tiny details can be helpful.

And so initially, for folks who haven’t done a lot of visualization, I’ll just have them imagine what it’s like to play a scale just the simple scale no one know about it just really slow even notes even just up one octave and then back down and after visualizing that have them actually play it and say you know what was missing what did you forget about any visualization or how close were they. And have give it a number, maybe it’s six the first time and so, you forgot what’s vibrato would feel like or the contact point between your thumb and the neck of the instrument.

And so, I will try it again and pay attention to those details to add those details into your visualization as you do another visual run through of that scale and then. All right. Now let’s play it again kind of going back and forth a few times to. Think of it as like calibrating the energy to make sure it’s as close to the real experience as it can be. And then oftentimes that will help to give them a sense of what visualization, feels like as it were and then they can start doing it in little tiny doses with certain passages or even if you’re just in the car and you can’t make it as vivid as you would want it to be know as you’re listening to recordings just tapping along on the steering wheel with your fingers to kind of mimic the fingerings that you’re using and I mean I found myself doing it pretty automatically, a lot of the time, just walking around waving for classes, just sitting because you know what else are you going to do?

But of course now, the problem is we have phones, so there’s always something to do. But back then there was we didn’t have phones where these phones you had only made phone calls and so other than reading a book which oftentimes you would carry about because it’s heavy. You just sat right. And so it’s I don’t know maybe things have changed with opportunity for visualization mental practice but it can be a pretty engrossing way to pass the time.

Christopher: And does it have a benefit? I mean, I’m sure people can imagine how this kind of visualization would help with performance anxiety, for example, where you kind of prepared for that moment on stage, but we’re talking about practice, we’re talking about like fingering technique, or dexterity and that kind of thing. Is there a real benefit, or is it just for that enjoyment of immersing yourself in the music?

Noa: Yeah I don’t even know that I would have been doing it for enjoyment. How to make sure that I would sound okay. My lesson or figuring, so, okay so it wasn’t driven by a private benefit, and actually I remember kind of joking with some friends we all took secondary piano at Juilliard who were non pianists and we’d have classes of like three or four people and we’d take turns playing what we were supposed to have worked on that weekend as we’re waiting a lot of times we’re doing mental practice trying to make sure that you know we’re ready to play the thing that we need you to play. So it does have practical usefulness. And for. Musicians for whom you know fingerings. Are an important part of playing more fluidly.

I did do a lot of work on fingering, just trying out different things in my head, and then I’d go to practice on that evening and see which of them really work because sometimes like oh this is gonna be an awesome fingering then you try to go, no, that doesn’t work at all. So it’s not a replacement for practice and certainly because you don’t get that feedback that you need to find out how things are really going to work but it’s better than nothing. It’s actually quite a bit better than nothing though unfortunately not as good as actual physical practice, but it’s a helpful supplement, and certainly like you said, can help with performance confidence if you visualize going on stage.

And so, there’s actually a great TED talk with the rock climber Alex Honnold, if you haven’t seen it, where he’s the one that free climbed El Capitan, I think a year ago, and he used visualization an awful lot to make sure that he could see his entire way up three thousand something feet because he had to be one mistake and he was dead so, yeah. So visualization I think is something that has been talked about in lots of different circles for good reason.

Christopher: And that’s one that I think a lot of people would associate with sports psychology, more than music psychology, maybe. Are there any other kind of big insights, or conclusions, from the world of sports psychology that most musicians are oblivious to and missing out on?

Noa: I don’t know that musicians are oblivious to it. It’s going sound so obvious, but athletes by nature of the way that their sports are generally structured, perform a lot. Right? There’s games, there’s scrimmages there’s even amongst teammates, there is there’s competition and so, but especially because there are more performances there’s more games. They compete more. You find out what’s working and what’s not working in a much more clear way much more often. Whereas I think I was as guilty of this for decades as anybody. But I didn’t want to record myself until I was quote ready or I didn’t want to play for other people until I was I felt ready like I delayed actually performing for people until I was ready.

So, even with performances I’d spend as much time as I could practicing practicing practicing while resisting at the same time I guess for practicing as much as I could up until the day of the performance when then I would get on stage and find out how prepared, I really was, which if you present that to a coach or an athlete they were like well what that doesn’t make any sense at all. And so, you knowy one of Jason Ives colleagues at the Met percussionist Rob. No I mean he’s kind of taken this to a whole nother level where you know most people before an audition they’ll do a few mock auditions right they’ll get us a screen set up they’ll go and play for some colleagues system from some friends you know to survive maybe like seven or 10 like really structured like fo audition situations to set up tents usually pretty unusual. Rob did 42 quite like you know six to eight weeks of one a day. And and even beyond that he set up his regular practice day to be like audition day.

He’d do like a short 10 minute warm up, then he’d run his list, and so you’d record yourself first when you feel uncomfortable instead of laughs at the end of the day when you feel comfortable which really exposes where things are at. And so, like I would maybe run a concerto with a pianist once or twice maybe in a lesson like I’d do a handful of things but I would never record myself a month out from the performance to see where things really were or you know daily for a week two weeks out to really find out where things are like I wouldn’t do performance practice in that way. And so I wouldn’t.

And so, that’s why I wouldn’t really know on the day of performance how it was going to go because that was the first time I was really going to test it whereas athletes you know like you know where you’re at with things because you’re playing 82 games at an NBA season or what seems like 1000 games in a baseball season like you know where your skills truly are in a performance sense. And so, I think the more opportunities musicians can take and it doesn’t have to be this painful thing. It can be fun. I mean I’ve talked to some adult learners who’ve set up these like performance clubs you know once a month or they’ll get together in a different person’s house, and they’ll have you know some wine and I think maybe after is better than before but you know, all those socializing there they’ll catch up on things and they’ll play for each other record it and then work on things for the next one in a month.

And then over time you just get not just more comfortable performing, and kind of the rituals of it, but you get an opportunity to practice the ability to switch to performance and you know how do you get started in the most effective way and how do you bounce back from mistakes and then it becomes a fun thing because it’s that’s kind of camaraderie that they’re building and skill development all at the same time. So yeah. So finding ways to practice performing and making it fun I think is something that that athletes do all the time probably without thinking about it whereas I think musicians tend to resist.

Christopher: Yeah, very cool. And so I’m feeling a bit bad at this point, because we left young Noa dangling in his slight spiritual crisis back at Juilliard, and clearly now you have great insights and techniques in your head for practicing and performing. Did you have a chance before you turned away from the professional musician career path, to put some of these ideas into practice for yourself?

Noa: Yeah. So it’s interesting because a lot of things came together at the same time. So, all of this sports psych stuff, understanding how to practice really effectively, and even figuring out how to approach a new piece of music that I’d never ever seen or heard before, or even one that I knew really well, like I felt like I finally got it, like you know I didn’t know what I was doing for the first 20 something years. I was just practicing and playing and correcting and trying to make pretty sounds, and play in tune. I didn’t really know what I was trying to do, and how to make decisions about music, and why to play something one way and why to play something another way, and all that stuff kind of came together like right at the very end.

It was it’s almost like in my last year of grad school, and then into that summer and then the year after, that’s when … so when I went to Indiana, I went to kind of follow my girlfriend, now my wife, as she was doing her master’s there. And I did two semesters of a performance diploma, and got to study with the new teacher who was awesome. And that semester was really interesting, because I knew I wasn’t going to go into music. And so I knew I didn’t have to, but I was practicing more just to entertain myself and to try out these things, and to see what happens if I practice more effectively.

And it was such a qualitatively different experience. You know, maybe partly colored by the fact that I knew it wasn’t gonna go into music, but I think the way that I practice changed, the way that I approached performing changed, and I had so many more tools to help me with that. A lot clearer what to do and how to approach things. So, to answer your question, yeah, I did get to implement the performance stuff, the practice stuff, the just understanding what it meant to be a musician piece, and it was a pretty cool time to be able to play all those.And I think if I had had that experience much sooner, I don’t know that I would have gone in a different direction necessarily than what I have.

But it certainly would have … It would have been fun to experience, at least college and grad school, you know, six years of that with all that stuff, ahead of time. But, then again I had a teacher who said, “Yeah, like you learn what you need to, when you need to.” Or something like that, like you know it’s hard to rush things, like I may not have ever gotten to that had I not gone through the experiences that I had in college, of not knowing those things, so who knows?

Christopher: And you snuck in a third thing there, which is fascinating, and I can’t leave lying there, which is what it means to be a musician or how to make the decisions about what you’re doing, which you seem to mentioned alongside practicing and performing. What’s that big bundle of stuff to you?

Noa: Yeah, you know I wish I could really answer that in a more articulate way, and I think maybe 10 years ago when I started to get clarity about that I probably could have, but I haven’t thought about that for so long that this may not be as concise or articulate as it could be, but basically what I figured out is, you know people I think in different fields say that, that at first when you’re new to a field it seems like there are a million details that you need to worry about, but when you really become an expert in something, you realize that those details really kind of coalesce into a set of key principles. And if you understand those principles really deeply, you can kind of adapt them and kind of apply them in an infinite range of different ways, but in a way that really feels simple to you.

And so, I remember this experience at a chair music workshop with Isaac Stern and so forth, all these amazing coaches with decades of wisdom and experience performing and studying music, and I was a sophomore in college, and I was in this trio with Marc and Pianist, and it’s just like … we didn’t … our minds were blown every day, it’s like, well how do you know that’s what you should be doing, or how do you not ask that question, or why take time here but not here? Like, how do you know to approach this dot this way, and not some other way, and just how do you know this stuff? Where does this all come from? We watched this one quartet, his name was Henry Meyer, look at a piece of music he’d never played before and just totally dump all this insight to the quartet, which had been playing it forever, and we’re just like, man.

And so, for me what it came down to is… I think his name is Daniel Levitan, he wrote the book you know, “This is Your Brain on Music” or something like that. And he said somewhere that basically all your brain is doing when we listen to music, is it’s trying to figure out what’s coming next, it’s trying to predict the future. Is it gonna get louder this time? And actually there’s a great TED talk, with conductor Ben Zander, where he kind of deconstructs this Chopin piece, which I recommend everyone watch, because that is sort of of the essence of what theory can help with, understanding music theory, but in a really kind of easy organic way, like it doesn’t have to be geeking out about Schenkerian analysis or anything like that, it’s just understanding harmony and so forth.

And so these things kind of … basically it occurred to me that music is about patterns, like you played something, it starts off and theory is not my strong point, so this might seem a little basic, but you start off in the tonic, and you wonder how long it’s going to go there, and then you know this note comes into play, with foreshadows something else that might happen, and then you modulate, and know point it comes back but, oh, not really, it’s deceptive, and then it goes somewhere else, and so it’s about these patterns and using these patterns. You kind of set up an expectation for something in the listeners ear, in real time, and then sometimes you give it to them, it’s like, “This is where I’m going to go, and yes, that’s where I went.” And they’re like, “Ah, nice.”

Other times, it’s like, “This is where I’m going go.” And then you think you’re going go there but, then go no, you take a left turn somewhere. It’s like, “Oh now I’m going to go back. Oh no not yet. Then I’m going to … ” So, whether it’s through just harmony or where the melody seems to be going or just sequences, there’s all these different cool things that composers utilize to set up expectations and then either to violate or kind of confirm them, and then highlighting those things as you go, whether it’s through dynamics or vibrato or just time.

To me, that’s what enabled me to look at a piece of music and figure out, “What am I trying to say here, what am I trying to do, what am I trying to bring out? What did the composer leave me with?” To make things fun for the listener and with expectations, kind of like I imagine how comedians set up jokes, and tell jokes, you know the timing of it all and set up and so forth. So, I don’t know if that is too vague and abstract or not, but for me anyway like, the clarity of that changed how I approach music, and what I need to do with all the details and the score.

Christopher: Super cool, nice. So you’ve been blogging for years at this point, and podcasting. Forgive me, I don’t know how long, but a fair while, at least a year and a half maybe? You’ve put a lot of fantastic material out there, but you’ve also done the really hard thing, which is to boil down all of the insights and wisdom from that, into a clear format for people to learn from. And that has come to be in your beyond practicing course, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you a little bit about that, and how you’ve managed to condense down the most important nuggets on the topic of practicing in particular to create that course?

Noa: Yeah. So, that’s the thing that I enjoy doing I enjoy, I think just for myself like I want things to be simple in my head, so when I, whenever I come across something I want to figure out how to make it something that I can kind of understand in as simple a way as possible, but also take action on. I don’t just want to know something, I want to know how can I use that to make better chocolate chip cookies, or to file my taxes in a more efficient way? Or lift more weights, in the least amount of time, and so forth-

Christopher: So, this is what’s covered in your course? The cookies and the weights and the taxes-

Noa: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, so the structure for this is actually. You know Don Green ended up being really influential to me. in a mentor over the years, and he created this assessment for musicians, the performance skills inventory. I think it’s probably still out there on his website, or maybe he has an evolved version of it now. He keeps going back and tweaking it. Well, basically it’s you know you take this assessment was like 80 something questions, and it gives you a sense of what your psychological strengths and weaknesses are.

And I remember taking that in his class, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s totally me. Yeah.” And it’s in a certain number of areas, like practice, yeah well you get prepared, but also your ability to manage anxiety, and build confidence and play more fearlessly under pressure, and concentration and focus, and the mental toughness, and things like that. And you know, I really found those factors to be pretty valuable, and really represent what the sports psychology literature looks like. And, so you know, I said, “Okay well, what can I find in the research that would really help with building confidence? What can I find that really seems to help with becoming more fearless?”

And let’s combine that with what other musicians have already been saying, all these years, or suggesting or recommending and doing. And so I tried to find the overlap between what the research says in these areas, and what musicians have said in these areas, and try to turn those into actionable exercises or drills or techniques, that people can actually practice and develop and get better at, so you can then use those in your monthly performance club, or your Christmas recital, or church performance and so forth. Yeah, so that’s that’s kind of what the course ended up being, and lot of it really was me having to teach, a semester long course, in these areas and how to structure that, and then that got condensed into a more online friendly version. But it’s largely what I teach on a weekly basis.

Christopher: And what are the parts of that course that typically resonate with people, or particularly impact them, that they can take away and think, “Okay, now I can totally nail this aspect of practicing or performing.”?

Noa: I don’t know that “totally nail” ever comes into the picture.

Christopher: Fair enough.

Noa: If you talk to, you know, great performers who’ve been performing for decades, who are household names, and they still talk about nerves and uncertainty and so forth a lot of times. But yeah, for me I think the parts of the course that I think almost everybody seems to benefit from, are focus, understanding like we talked about already today, you know, what exactly should we be thinking about? How do I keep my focus here for the duration of the performance, and how do I practice that, develop that skill?

And also, you know, managing anxiety, like we’re not going to get rid of it, but we can certainly get more comfortable with it and be more familiar with it, and understand how to keep it from spiraling out of control and getting into the panicky zone, and using it even, and benefiting from it, so that it becomes more like that sort of good nerves, that excitement, that we bring to performance, as opposed to it feeling like something that’s going to derail our performance.

Christopher: Wonderful. I have been an avid reader of your blog, and listener of the Bulletproof Musician podcast for quite some time. So, I was really looking forward to this opportunity to talk with you about performance and practice, and turns out a whole other third area, in terms of musical expression and making those choices. And it has not failed to live up to my very high expectations. You’re a man that can back up everything he says with interesting research studies, and factual practical advice, which is terrific, particularly on these topics that can be, as you alluded to a bit hand wavey, you’re a bit fluffy, you know imagining the audience in their underwear type stuff. So, I just wanted to wrap up by saying a big thank you, not just for joining us on the show today, but for everything you’ve published through Bulletproof Musician, because almost anyone I talk to in the music ed world, reads your blog, listens to your podcast, and has benefited from what you’re putting out there. So, a big thank you for the work you do.

Noa: My pleasure. It’s really been pretty fun for me as well, I never imagined this is what I would be doing, but it’s been pretty cool ride.

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Musical U’s own Adam Liette talks about his long and winding musical journey – from his conservatory years, to serving his country through music in the Army band, to his work at Musical U – and the realizations he’s made along the way about playing professionally vs. playing for the sake of joy and fulfillment.

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• About the Message in the Music

Transcript

Hello. My name is Adam Liette and welcome to the Musicality Podcast. Now if you’re a regular listener to the show, you’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute. That’s not Christopher Sutton.” No it’s not. Christopher asked if I could share with you some of my personal insights and experiences, and how it really relates to you our audience at the Musicality Podcast.

I’m the communications manager for Musical U, and in that job I do just a wide variety of different things. And one of those things that I love to do is to manage all of our social media channels on Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube, and Pinterest. And I love to get to see and read your comments, the things that you post on our articles and our videos. And it’s a great thing to get to hear so many of you musicians, and how what we’re doing at Musical U inspires you.

And then every now and then there’s a comment from someone that feels that life has passed them by, that they were a musician and now they’re too old to pick it up again, or too old to pick it up for the first time. And it just breaks my heart because that hasn’t been the case in my life. It hasn’t been the case in my experiences, and I just wanted to share with you just how far you can get away from music and still come right back to it.

So I’m calling this episode The Long and Winding Road, not just because I love the Beatles, and I do, but because that’s how life feels sometimes. We get this perception from our coaches, and teachers, and family that we should have this path in our life, these goals that we set when we’re 18 and 19 years old, and we continue on until we fulfill those goals, and we’re happy and we live happily ever after. And I know for me that hasn’t been the case. And I imagine for a lot of you it’s not as well. And that’s not just because of my age, I’m barely a millennial, just barely, and my generation is pretty notorious for career changes. We are not set to just stick in the same job. We move around a lot and we do a variety of different things. And that certainly has been the case in my life.

So just to travel way back to that time when we’re supposed to make those decisions. At age 18 I entered into college. I had this dream of being a band director. And so I went to the conservatory, and for the next four years studied classical music in hopes of becoming a high school music teacher. Now at the time I was also playing Rock and Roll. That’s how I largely financed my college education. So I was learning classical music all day, and going and playing heavy metal at night, kind of a juxtaposition and an odd mix of different musical styles, but I loved it! I love the variety of music I had in my life and how I’d just go from Mussorgsky and Mahler to Megadeth and Metallica. It was wonderful. I loved it.

And then I graduated. And I graduated, I’m supposed to go get a job, get married, do all those things that we’re supposed to do. And instead I chose a remarkably different path. You may remember, this was back in 2006 when I graduated, and at the time the war in Iraq was raging. We were at the height of the war and the surge was in effect. And I was at that age where for better or worse I felt that it was my turn, it was my time. And I was compelled to put aside everything else and go serve my country. Now I didn’t do it the typical way, just entering the Army, I entered the Army band because that made the most sense to me. And I would do it again, absolutely.

And so I served my country through music. I was a trumpet player and so I played Taps for funerals, was one of my biggest jobs during my first year in the service. I played Taps for hundreds of funerals, because I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And Airborne does mean we jump out of airplanes. That was part of our job was we were paratroopers. And the 82nd Airborne really took a big hit in that war. It was not pretty. And I’ve talked about this on a previous episode of the podcast, talking about what that was like to play Taps for so many funerals.

Now it wasn’t all drudgery and these kind of depressing gigs. I got to do some incredible gigs. I got to play at NASCAR races. I’ve played for two U.S. presidents, four star generals, and U.S. ambassadors. I toured the world as a musician in the Army band, going to Afghanistan and training the Afghan National Army Band for a year, in addition to also picking up country music as I was touring around the country playing for our troops, living out of Black Hawk helicopters, the ultimate dream as a musician, right?

And life was great. I was a father. I had two young children at home. I had a wonderful wife. Everything should have been perfect, and I should have been able to stay on this path that I was on as a professional musician making a living. And yet once again life pulled me in a different direction, because I did love my job, I loved the service, but I still felt the need to go a little deeper. And so I tried out for U.S. Army Special Operations, and to my complete shock I made it. I made it through the initial selection. I ended up going through a year long qualification course. And then for the next seven years I was in an operational unit deploying almost every year. I deployed for a certain amount of time, and I wasn’t home a lot.

Now I remember when I made the switch I deliberately decided if I can’t be a professional musician, I don’t want to play anymore. Because I felt at the time that I had reached a certain level of performance, a certain level of professionalism that I wouldn’t be happy playing as a “amateur” anymore. I wouldn’t be happy and content with my musical experience unless I could continue to play at the level that I had been playing. And just from a mechanical perspective, if you’re not playing the trumpet for two to three hours a day at the level that I was playing, two to three hours a day is just maintenance. You’re not improving at that point, at that level. And so I gave it up entirely, because I knew that. I knew that there was no way I could maintain where I was as a musician and still have a job, and still be a family man. So I gave it up entirely. And for close to two years during the initial training and some of my initial deployments I didn’t play at all. I would barely even listen to music, let alone actively listen to music. Music became a background. It became something I used to do, someone I used to be.

And then little things started to happen. I remember being on the deployment when our host nation counterparts invited us out to Karaoke. And after a couple beers I agreed to go sing. And I didn’t let go of the microphone for the rest of the night. I sang one song, they went absolutely crazy and asked for more. And so I kept singing. And then someone came up with a guitar and they gave it to me. And I hadn’t played guitar in close to two or three years. But it was like riding a bike. I picked it right back up. I strummed a few chords and played some songs.

And that was the start of a slow journey back. A slow journey realizing that, yes. I would never be the professional level musician that I was ever again. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with just playing for the sake of playing, and playing for my own enjoyment, playing for my own self fulfillment.

And this would repeat itself over the years several times. So I knew that the path I was on and the job I was doing, I couldn’t do that forever. Who can do that kind of job forever? Plus I had a very loving wife who was more than ready to be done with the military. And so I did all those other things you’re supposed to do. I went to grad school. I got my MBA. And I was a couple years away from getting out of the military and I was just bored, so I started freelancing. I was deployed and I needed something to pass the time in the evening, so I started working in digital marketing. And I was just having a hard time initially getting gigs, getting clients, because without getting too much into specifics, this is kind of a dog eat dog industry.

And then along the way the most amazing thing happened, is I saw an advertisement online for this company called Musical U that was looking for a communications manager to help with their company. And I applied for the job and I got it, and I’ve been here ever since. And I just think it’s so amazing when I sit here and reflect on everything I’ve been through, everything I’ve done, the amount of countries I’ve been to, the times I’ve been around the world, and there’s always these opportunities that just present themselves. They appear in front of us, and it’s amazing what happens when you have the ability to say yes, I will do that. Yes, I will take that chance and put myself out there, and maybe do something I’m a little uncomfortable with because I haven’t done it in a while.

Now you may be thinking, “Gosh Adam. You’re just lucky. You got this gig landed in your lap, and now you’re able to do this again.” But I don’t believe in luck. I believe that luck is what happens when preparation and opportunity meet. We all make our own luck, and it’s a matter of recognizing the opportunities when they’re in front of us, and jumping back into something that we are deeply passionate about even if we’re scared to. And since then I’ve discovered that yes, mechanically I’m not nearly as proficient a musician as I used to be. But in many ways I’m a better musician, because I have a deeper appreciation for the art, I have a deeper love and passion for making music. But I developed and matured as a person so that I’m more able to apply myself to go through different exercises, to learn from different experts, and to become an even better musician than I was in many aspects.

And that’s really something that I’ve noticed just in the short time here at Musical U, all those things, those innate inner skills of musicality, they’ve come back tenfold. I’m now for the first time able to really hear intervals, able to hear a progression and a melody in a way that I wasn’t be able to back when I was playing professionally. And it’s because I was not afraid, and I was able to take that chance.

And as I sit here now I think to something that often happens in our culture, in our societies, where you compare a man to their father. And I’m realizing more and more that we are a lot alike. I’ve always known that, but even more now because my father had very much a similar career path. He started as a musician, left in order to raise us, raise us children, and took a different career. And now that we’re grown and out of the house, he’s able too, to return to music. And it’s not in the way that he thought he would ever do it. But it was opportunities that presented themselves in front of him that he was able to jump on to do something different, and discover a new passion for a different genre and style of music that he never knew he had. For my father specifically it’s Barbershop, not really what he thought he would ever get into. But because of where he was in singing in our church choir and being a community band director, an opportunity presented itself and he was able to take that opportunity, and make it his own and discover a new passion and love for music that he didn’t have before.

And I just think we only have so much time on this Earth, so much time together, so much time to share and experience this joy. If we’re not taking advantage of it, if we’re not looking for those opportunities and doing stuff that may seem out of the norms, but you know it makes you happy, you know it fulfills you, I just think that’s one of the greatest gifts we’re given is these opportunities and the people that we meet, the experiences that we have, and the joy and pleasure of being able to share with others.

And that’s what I wanted to do on this episode of the podcast, share with you some of my journey, how I came here in hopes that I will inspire just one of you. If I do that, I’ll be thrilled. So just to close the episode, we are all on a winding road, this winding path of life and it will take many turns. And whether or not you came from a position of being a professional musician, or you’ve ever just thought that you would like to play music, don’t be afraid to just take that opportunity, take that chance, because you’ll never know until you do it. Because life is too short to live with regrets or what could have beens, when we have every opportunity we need right in front of us. Until then this is Adam Liette from the Musicality Podcast and I’ll see you next time.

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The post About the Long and Winding Road appeared first on Musical U.

Things got serious a few years later when a friend gave me a copy of Cakewalk Sonar 4 for my PC. The ability to create music at home was a revolution for me, and I spent thousands of hours writing, recording, and remixing in front of a computer screen over the next few years.

The ability to record music at home is almost taken for granted in the modern era. Most computers now come equipped with free versions of DAW software, more than capable of capturing your music and offering a wealth of free sounds.

Whether you consider yourself a more traditional musician and dedicate your time to mastering your instrument, or gravitate more towards the production side, the ability to record your music without paying for expensive studio time is a real privilege.

A World Connected

Sooner or later, most of us as musicians, songwriters, or producers want to take our music to the next level and collaborate with others. I was no different, and in a digital age I soon discovered that I could work with musicians and producers from anywhere in the world, right from my bedroom.

Imagine you are a budding singer or songwriter. You’ve got a great voice, and you feel you have a real talent for writing lyrics and melodies. You can strum a few chords on the guitar, bash out a couple of chords on the piano, but you are by no means an accomplished instrumentalist and have no idea how to mix and master a song so that it sounds radio-worthy.

This is where remote recording makes something magical happen. Imagine, you’ve been working on your own music part-time at home after you finish work, and you’ve written a song over some very basic chords you’ve strummed on your acoustic guitar. Now, you want to turn it into a full-fledged song by filling out the instrumentals, adding embellishments, and of course, getting a killer mix. How will you do it?

Making the Magic Happen – Remotely!

You could have a drummer in Chicago lay down an original drum track for you from his home studio, and send you the .wav files back in a few days. You find an awesome keys player from Sweden, who enhances the basic chords you wrote with an intricate piano track and synth lines. You hire a guitarist from Manchester who has a really unique playing style that you love, and he nails a guitar line that brings your song to life.

Now that you have all the parts, you need to put them together. You find a producer based in New York – he mixes your track and sends you a couple of revisions until it’s tweaked the way you want it. Finally, you hire a separate mastering engineer from France and when you get the master file back two days later, your track sounds unbelievable.

From that simple idea you had in your bedroom two weeks before, you now have a track that sounds like it belongs on the radio.

Why? Because this is how songs on the radio are made.

Parts are played by experienced session musicians, who can totally transform or create parts for you or play them exactly as you instruct.

Don’t feel bad about it, you aren’t cheating here. Ariana Grande didn’t lay down the drum track on her last number one, and you shouldn’t, either. There are loads of musicians who take the DIY mentality to the extreme – but attempting to do everything yourself is a mistake, and it’s wise to play to your strengths.

Maybe In A Perfect World…

The above example is how remote recording should go in a perfect world. In reality, it’s highly unlikely the process would run this smoothly. Back in 2010, when I first starting reaching out to collaborate with people, there was literally no platform and these interactions were all handled over emails or MSN messenger. Sending or receiving payments was fraught with danger, and there was little recourse if the parts we not delivered to standard (or not delivered at all, which was also known to happen).

In 2018, the remote recording industry is a slow-moving beast, but still ever-growing. Most of the companies who provide remote services are based in the USA, and I was surprised to find that there was no dedicated remote recording service that was based in the UK. That was until 2016, when we started our company Kollab and became the first.

I still find it strange that so many people are unfamiliar with the concept of remote recording, as it has been happening within the music industry for decades on a larger scale. For example, for all of the songs Slash recorded with Michael Jackson in the early 90’s, the two were never in the same room together!

The Pitfalls of Remote Recording

Like any emerging market, we are constantly having to educate people about the service we provide and the benefits it can offer to aspiring musicians, vocalists and producers. Although there are more options out there than ever before, there are still numerous pitfalls to the remote recording market – proof that the exciting world of remote recording is still in its infancy.

For example, the majority of remote recording websites today operate as a marketplace service – this means musicians sign up as sellers and the interactions are left for the buyer and seller to handle between them. Whilst a good idea in theory, over the years I found frustration with this model as it makes it harder for the websites to control the quality of the output, and often leads to rogue sellers encouraging people to work outside of the platform (which always end badly for the buyer).

The marketplace format often leaves a cold feeling on many websites, with little to no interaction from the website themselves. You are basically in the hands of the seller, without any customer service interaction from the company.

The other big issue that is commonly encountered in this emerging market is finding reputable professionals. Most marketplace formats allow anybody to create a “seller” or vendor account and sell their services, but it is a real lottery whether you are dealing with an industry professional or an enthusiastic amatuer.

The Kollab Solution

The past couple of years have been a learning curve for Kollab, as we initially followed the marketplace format when we launched. Discovering quickly that the site was being driven away from the high-quality service we always wanted to provide, we now take a more hands on, agency-style approach.

If you visit the Kollab website the first thing you will notice is that our artists have worked with some big stars. We are talking household names here, from Led Zeppelin to Little Mix. And, although the names of our session players on those hit records or tours may not be familiar to most, you are still getting access to the same talent as those multi-platinum artists did.

Reducing Overheads

Not only do we at Kollab make award-winning industry professionals accessible to anyone, but the fees to hire them are surprisingly modest, compared to hiring out a recording studio for the day and paying for their time and travel in the traditional way. Embracing the concept of remote recording and communicating everything over phone and email (with the help of our dedicated staff), it’s now affordable for anybody to hire the best talent for their music.

We have handpicked all of our artists and are completely confident that every project delivered will exceed expectations. It’s for this reason we offer a money back guarantee if you are not completely satisfied with the recording works you receive (incidentally, we’ve never had to enforce this).

By Musicians, For Musicians

As a recording bedroom artist myself, I have been in the exact same place as my customers find themselves: not sure whether to take a leap of faith and hire someone I’ve never met from a website. Musicians have to work hard for their money, and it shouldn’t be gambled with, which is why we have taken every step to give our buyers complete confidence. It’s also the reason Kollab was created in the first place.

Bringing Your Musical Dream to Life

Remote recording is a great way to work with the best possible people to make your musical dreams come to life – with concerns such as geographical distance and a lack of recording studio becoming obsolete, you’re free to focus on making amazing music with the help of dedicated professionals around the world.

If you write and record original music and would like to learn more about how our services could help you, get in touch with us. We are always happy to have a chat about your project and can cater for all genres, budgets, and deadlines.

Kollab lets you hire industry professional music producers, vocalists, and session musicians through a reputable, quality-guaranteed platform – at a fraction of the cost of traditional recording studios! With our service, you’ll work remotely with musicians and artists all over the world, gaining access to top-level industry talent to make your song a hit.

The post Kollaborating with the Best appeared first on Musical U.

We had been really impressed by the practice and performance tips Josh shares in particular and so we were excited to have him as a guest on the show to dive into these topics as well as his own musical journey.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How to make technique exercises more interesting and a more valuable use of your practice time
• The clever performance strategy that involved him making snowballs before sitting down at the keyboard
• The three “levers” you can play around with to transform a robotic performance into a truly musical one
• The reason he will still travel long distances to go visit his childhood piano teacher when preparing new repertoire.

This was a seriously value-packed conversation, Josh has tons of practical tips and mindset-shifting insights which he shares freely so we know you’ll be taking away some impactful ideas from this episode for your own practicing and performing.

One quick note – we failed to sound check the piano before we began the interview and so there are a few spots where Josh demonstrates something and you’ll hear the sound get a bit crunchy. We apologise for that, but we think the points he’s making still come across fine.

We hope you’ll enjoy this episode!

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Josh Wright Piano
• Josh Wright’s courses on Teachable.com – 20% off with coupon code PODCAST
• How to Learn A New Piano Piece Quickly and Efficiently
• How to Memorize Music Quickly and Effectively
• Efficient Practice Piano Lesson
• A Quick Fix For Weak Spots In Your Playing
• 5 Tips To Get Rid of Nerves and Stage Fright When Performing
• Overcoming Performance Anxiety and Stage Fright
• Mastering Rubato: How To Sound Like a Pro
• Tone Quality – Create a More Beautiful Sound At The Piano
• The Piano Mastery Checklist
• The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle

Transcript

Josh: Hi, this is Josh with Josh Wright Piano TV and you’re listening to the Musicality Podcast.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Josh. Thank you for joining us today.

Josh: Oh, so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Christopher: You are someone who began studying music fairly seriously from a very young age, is that right?

Josh: Yeah, I started when I was 5 years old, taking piano lessons. My mom had taught piano in our basement for my whole young childhood and I’d always begged her to play piano, so she said, “Yeah, you can take lessons with me for a few weeks and then go to your grandma for lessons after that.” My grandma was a piano teacher and actually taught me for five years, and then after that, I went to the university teacher that I studied with for almost 15 years.

Christopher: Interesting and so your mom and your grandma were both equipped to teach you piano. Had music and music education been in your family throughout for generations?

Josh: No, actually my grandma was the first one. She would babysit kids and then she would use that to buy her piano books and pay for her own piano lesson, so she was a real go getter and then my mom took piano lessons actually with my same teacher. She was like, “I don’t know why Susan,” my university teacher, “ever accepted you,” because I was the worst student ever, but anyway, she said that she’d had a wonderful upbringing in music during her childhood because my grandma was always teaching piano round-the-clock, so it was a part of the family culture, but it was largely just thanks to my grandma’s initiative.

Christopher: Was there an expectation then that you would be a fairly serious musician or go on to be a piano teacher yourself even?

Josh: I don’t think so. That’s one thing my parents really let us decide. My dad grew up in a household of stonemasons, like laid stones on houses and mailboxes and fireplaces and things like that and his dad, it was work and church and that’s all they knew growing up and so my dad said, “I wanted to be very different. I want you guys to pursue whatever career paths you would like.” I have two brothers and a sister and being a stonemason is one of the most manly things you can do. In order, it goes me, I’m a pianist, my brother is a male nurse, my next brother is a band teacher and then my sister is also a pianist.

I think we chose the most feminine professions coming from stonemasonry, so anyway, but yeah, it’s been a wonderful opportunity. My mom had to drop out of college because she got cancer. She overcame it, but she only did about a year of college. My dad never had education past high school, but they definitely placed a large emphasis on education, so really amazing parents helped to set up a successful career for each of us kids.

Christopher: Fantastic! What did those early years of piano look like for you? What were those lessons with your grandma like for the first five years or so?

Josh: Yeah, I always love performing besides my first recital where I ran off the stage crying because I forget the first note.

Christopher: Wait, you have tell us that story a bit more.

Josh: Oh, yeah. My mom said, “You got up to the piano. You put your hands up and then you shouted, ‘Mom!’ and ran off the stage crying because I guess you’ve forgotten your first note.” Besides that, I always love performing. I think I must have been 5 years old at that point, but yeah, beyond that, I always love performing. I didn’t always love practicing at that stage, but it was a requirement in our house like you didn’t go play with your friends until your piano was done and your homework and that was always enforced throughout my life and my next brother’s life.

My brother after that kind of got away with murder. My mom was like, “You know what? Just get out of here,” because he was a troublemaker, but anyway, when I switched to my university teacher, she said, “I expect two and a half hours a day from you,” and as a 9-1/2-year-old, that was a lot, but I never missed because if I missed, my mom would make me make it up the next day, so if I only did an hour one day, she said, “You have an hour and a half from yesterday to make up, so that’s four hours.” That really got us. I only think I hit practice five hours probably in two or three times because that’s how infrequently I missed because I knew that if I didn’t do it one day, so that consistency really helped my growth as a pianist.

Christopher: Wow! Just to pick up on something there. You said your university teacher, this was a faculty member at the university who was teaching you privately, is that right?

Josh: That’s correct, yes.

Christopher: And you said two and a half hours at the age of 9 or so.

Josh: Yeah.

Christopher: That seems pretty intense.

Josh: Yeah. Well, I think it was because I went to her and I auditioned with her and luckily I got in to her studio. She took me on and then she said, “What are your goals with piano?” and I said, “I want to play with the Utah Symphony,” and she said, “Okay, if you’re going to be that serious, you need between two and three hours a day, so we set it at two and a half and I actually ended up playing with the Symphony a few years later which was a lot of hard work and a bit of luck too because they take the winners of this local competition and then about 50 kids auditioned for it and they chose six.

I think it must have been lucky. I was a very small little kid, so maybe I was the cute one on the program or something, but it was really intense to even go through that process. There’s a lot of hard work, a lot of failures. I mean I think right after I started with her I started competing and I think I lost like pretty much every competition up until that next local competition where I was able to audition with the Symphony. I actually won that one and then went on to play with the Symphony. A lot of perseverance.

Christopher: Yeah. I’d love to just dwell on that for a moment before we continue your story because you’re someone who has this very impressive performance track record starting as early as 9 years old or 12, 13 with the Symphony, and at the same, you’re clearly very down-to-earth. You’re not one of these concert pianists who’s totally got the head in the clouds and believes themselves to be a virtuoso genius from birth. I’d love to understand, where did your perspective on performance and your ability to juggle both high standards and the kind of humility you just demonstrated when you said, “Maybe, I was the little cute one”?

You clearly got your head on straight. Can you think back to when you were 12 or 13? As you’d said, you’d had some failures, you’d been struggling, but then you got this amazing opportunity. How are imagining your musical life at that point? How are you seeing yourself as a musician?

Josh: I think the perspective came in from my mom because she would always say, “You know, I was head cheerleader in high school and I had good grades, but I took all the easy classes,” and my dad was like, “I want more for you, boys.” I think the perspective of my parents was really helpful because they always wanted more for us, but my mom always would say, I would come off stage and I’d say, “Oh, I missed like these three passages. I totally messed up,” she’s like, “Yeah, but your tuxedo looks really nice,” or like, “Your hair looked good.” That always kind of brought me back to Earth and my piano teacher was always very encouraging.

When I was really young, I was very ambitious though, so I said, “I want to be famous one day. I want to play with all the greatest symphonies around the world, and as I kept getting older and competing more once I realized the hardships of the life of a constant traveling concert pianist, I think that also helped me ground me because I look at some as amazing as Daniil Trifonov, probably the most famous young pianist alive today and he looks exhausted. I mean I’ve had dinner with him before because I’ve done some private studies with Sergei Babayan who is his teacher and I hear about what that must be like.

The aspirational element of, “Oh, I need to be famous,” that dwindled. That’s a very fickle and not a goal of substance, so that kind of dwindled and then it got me thinking, “What do I really want to do?” I want to always perform because I always want to keep my skills the best that I can but I also kind of shifted towards teaching, not only as a way to support myself but because I really loved it and that has brought about a whole new level and a whole new set of goals and purpose in life.

Christopher: I see. It’s not many 8 or 9 – or 12 or 16 or 18 – year-olds who have the ear and the appreciation for classical music to pursue classical piano the way you did. I think often when we hear that story, there’s a strong parent standing behind the child, motivating them and driving them, but clearly for you, you had internal motivation going on. What was your relationship with classical music? How are you, a 9-year-old, who could say, “I want to play for a symphony,” and even knew what a symphony was?

Josh: My parents had taken us to the symphony a lot when we were young. They got season tickets which again is I pay a lot of credit to them because I mean, here’s my dad, he was a stonemason, I don’t know if he’d ever been to the symphony before he met my mom to be honest and my mom, well, she loved music and she loved classical music because she studied for a year or two of college. I don’t know how often she would go to the symphony growing up, so I think they wanted to instil really good culture into us as kids. Again, I think the parenting aspect is one of the great reasons and then I just fell in love with it because I would listen to these recordings.

I remember one time I was so proud of myself because I think I was 8 or 9 and my grandma was like, “Let’s listen to this recording of Rachmaninoff, Third Concerto,” and it was Yefim Bronfman playing and I was so proud of myself because I could follow along and I could see where he was in the music and I was like, “I must be really good if I could follow along in the music to where he is.” Those kind of experiences like my grandma just sitting with me next to her little stereo and pulling out the music and putting those in, I think I really owe so much of that to my family culture of loving music and promoting the arts in our family.

Beyond that, once I saw I think it was Ryan Brown of The 5 Browns. I think it was the youngest one, it could have been Greg, but I’m pretty sure it was Ryan who played with the Utah Symphony at one of the concerts that we had season tickets to, it’s called Salute to Youth, once I saw him play on that Salute to Youth concert where they featured young local artist, I said, “That’s what I want to do. I love this,” and it was just so exciting, and to see another little kid, I think Ryan might be a year or two or three older than I am, but to see someone around my age playing with the Symphony, I said, “I want to do that.”

Shortly thereafter, I had switched to my new teacher and then I actually played with a little local nine-piece orchestra that pretty much my teacher just hired local musicians to play for her students, little concertos at a local church, but that really motivated me. It was not only good parenting, but great opportunities offered by my first teacher, Susan Duelhmeier who really set me up for success and help instill that love into me.

Christopher: Terrific! Let’s talk a little bit about that period if we may because you as we’ll touch on shortly have some really great insights on performance and practicing and the psychology and practicalities of becoming a very excellent musician and again, I love to hear where these things comes from and where they originate, and from what I gathered, Susan was a really big influence on you and youo studied with her for a number of years, is that right?

Josh: Yes, I started when I was 9-1/2 and I studied with her all the way through to the end of my master’s degree which is crazy when you think about that. Usually people are switching teachers every few years, but she just had so much to offer and was such a wonderful teacher. I even flew out to LA just this past September to go play the Saint-Saens Concerto No. 2 before I performed here with the Salt Lake Symphony and she still had so many wonderful things to say, so I’ll still go see her for lessons. She’s just that kind of teacher. She’s just that good and she’s that sharp to even now after 25 years of study, she’s still pointing out things that I’ll miss, not necessary notes that I missed.

At this point, I can handle almost everything on my own, but she’ll help me with stylistic things that I may not have thought of before. She is next to my parents the greatest influence I had growing up to help shape my future, to help instill that love of music.

Christopher: I’m sure people listening would love to hear some examples of what she might say to you at this stage because as you just said we kind of assume someone at your level, they can get the notes right and then everything else is up to them, but it sounds like she’s still acting as some kind of coach or artistic input for you. Could you maybe tell us the kinds of things that she might say to you after you played something for her?

Josh: Oh, right now? Like things that she’s helping me –

Christopher: At this stage.

Josh: Yeah, sure. When I flew out to LA … Do you want me to demonstrate on this piano?

Christopher: Yeah, please. Sure.

Josh: So I was playing Saint-Saens and a lot of people kind of storm through this first part. She said, “You know? It’s nice, but it really doesn’t touch me to a great extent.” She said, “It needs to really speak. Each little phrase needs to speak. Go up to there and then raise all down to there,” and then another thing she’d said, “You really have beautiful right hand, but still involve your left hand in the shade even though it’s secondary. Maybe here and then sing with this. Same thing here. See with this left hand. Another problem I was having is…

Sorry, I haven’t played this for about two months now. You can watch the recording on YouTube if you want, but for instance, on the second movement, I was tending to rush those or I wouldn’t wait on all of my rest, so I’ll go. Maybe a little too fast for us. That would provide more clarity if I would spend more patience.

A lot of it is having patience with things, bringing out lines more clearly, maybe some manipulation of the rubato, the pushing and pulling of time and stylistic things. She would be the first to say, even I hadn’t flown out to see her, the performance wouldn’t have been successful because at this point, I know what I’m doing but those little nuggets of wisdom just helped to put me at ease emotionally and also just gave me a few things to think about that really made the performance way more successful.

I think at any stage, I mean even Lang Lang had said he still sees a teacher occasionally because his playing gets strange if he doesn’t, and I think that’s a great way of putting it because if you’re playing, it’s left up to its own thing. By degrees, it can become strange. One day, you might do something just a tiny bit different and then that’s your new norm and then it’s a tiny bit more different. After a month or two, it’s still completely normal to you, but it’s so far off the mark. I remember I was playing Schumann, Sonata in G Minor.

A wonderful piece, but I remember one section I was taking out the tempo like 20 notches on the metronome and my teacher said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Oh, this sounds good. This is even.” It’s so crazy because it had just happened by degrees over two or three months and I hadn’t played that for anyone, so it had just gradually worked into this new norm for me and then when I put a metronome to it, I was like, “Oh, my goodness. I’m way off.” That’s why it’s so important to see a teacher. They help keep you aligned and it’s an extra set of ears to make sure that you’re not totally off the mark.

Christopher: Interesting. I’m reminded of something I believe I saw on your website, maybe when talking about your ProPractice Course which was that you would like to act as a mentor for your students. I wonder if you could just explain a bit what that word means to you because it sounds like Susan at this point, she’s not a teacher in the sense of showing you where to put your fingers. She’s playing a slightly higher level role maybe that is more like a mentor or a coach. How do you see that role for a musician?

Josh: Yeah, I think a mentor is someone that can inspire you, keep you grounded, someone who can point out mistakes, that you’ll listen to them rather than just this authoritarian figure that makes you feel bad about yourself which I’ve had in different master class situations. I won’t name any names, but there’s been quite a few. I think that she’s played that role beautifully because she always makes you feel that she cares. Same thing with Sergei Babayan. I occasionally go see him for a lesson or even my teacher at Michigan, Logan Skelton. He’s one of my greatest friends.

I mean he’s just such a wonderful guy that you can just have dinner with but then when you get into the studio, you’re going to work and the friendship is put aside and if he needs … Babayan would yell at me a little bit, but Logan and Susan wouldn’t yell, but if they need to be stern with you, they will. I remember I was playing for Logan Skelton at Michigan, he’s a wonderful teacher and it’s my first year. I was still kind of adjusting to his style, but I have this phobia of playing harsh. I don’t like really harsh sounds like really metallic sounds.

I remember I was playing Schubert, Sonata, for him, but everything had become completely washed out and blurry and not great and he said, “What are you doing?” and I said, “I don’t want to play harsh,” and he’s like, “You need to stop with this.” That was like a pretty intense lesson and I walked out thinking, “Gosh! Is my whole perception of sound skewed?” but that’s I think what a mentor does, is they make you question your norms, they make you question what you feel about the piece, and on that same note, they make you reinforce what you do believe in.

He would say, “Do you really want it sound like this?” and it would make me question and say, “Do I?” If the answer is yes, I believe in it that much more. I think a mentor not only points things out that might be distasteful, but they also help you reinforce your own beliefs about what music is all about and what you want to convey which each composer’s works.

Christopher: Fantastic! Well, I was going to come to this later in our conversation, but maybe now is a good time to unpack this question of, what makes for a truly musical performance? Because there were a couple of videos of yours that I really enjoyed, one was actually about tone what you just mentioned about harsh versus a softer tone on the piano, which I really appreciate it because I think the piano is not an easy instrument to bring out a variety of tone from compared to something like electric guitar where you got a board of pedals and every possible combination of sounds at your fingertips and you explained really well that loud and harsh and not necessarily one on the same and you can play loud with a nice tone and vice versa and the other was about rubato and dynamics.

It just all made me want to really hear from you on this topic of shaping a performance and bringing musicality to it because several things you’ve said in the last few minutes touched on this question of, what are you trying to express? I’d love to just hear you speak on this if you would, what factors or what aspects are you’re playing around with to take something from kind of the pure literal sheet music definition of the piece and turn it into something that people are going pack a concert hall to hear you perform?

Josh: Sure. I think a strategy I use is to figure out, this is the practical side of things, the different climactic points of the piece and then you work around that. I remember I was teaching for the first time the Bach, C Sharp Minor Fugue from Book 1 and it was a triple fugue with very truncated short subjects which makes it extremely difficult to know how to manipulate. You think, “Oh, my gosh! Not work with a lot here.” The fugue in of itself is a fairly complex structure. Bach was truly the master of fugues but then to do a triple fugue, basically you have three different subjects, statements, and each of them come back.

They’re manipulated in different ways and so I was teaching this brilliant 14-year-old girl in Australia named Jennifer. She’s so fun to work with and I said, “Okay, I’m not really sure what to do here as your teacher either. So I’m going to teach how I would approach this.” We went through and I said, “Okay, where do you feel like on the page is your biggest climactic points?” so we identified together a couple of climactic points. I said, “Okay, if you’re working up to that point, that means you need to be softer before. Where do you feel like the softest point is? Okay, here it is. Okay, now, if that’s the softest point, it probably has to die away to that softest point.”

After just a few decisions, you can really start to shape the entire piece because everything is cause and effect or choice and consequence. If you choose to be loud here, then it’s probably going to soft before that. That’s a practical way of going about how to shape a piece and how to make it special. Beyond that, I like to try to convey some type of image or experience or emotion with each piece, and then within each piece, each large section, and then within each large section, each phrase, and then within each phrase, small nuances. I like to think of the whole piece as this overarching shape, just maybe like a semi-circle. It works up to a climax, comes back down or maybe it works all the way to the end with a climax.

It’s kind of these waveforms but within each smaller section there are smaller waveforms even down to the minute, like one bar at a time, you can still have small nuances in it and those types of questions like, where am I going to shape this tiny phrase? Where is this leading? Okay, how does this fit in to a larger scheme? That’s what I like to be asking myself and that’s what I ask about my students so that we can make that there is never a boring moment, that we’re always leading somewhere that is always leading or dying or growing or decaying so it always keeps the listener engaged and you can even hear on way more professional recordings than I’d like to admit that sometimes they’re playing becomes stagnant and then even though their technique might be amazing it alienates you as a listener.

If you hear someone pound through more than just a few bars, it’s going to alienate your ears, and even though it feels powerful, it loses the effect because it’s not leading anywhere. I’d like to always be asking myself those types of questions and the same can be said about rubato, kind of the pushing and pulling of time. Where do I want this phrase to pull back? Where do I want to push ahead? That can really enhance the experience for the listener.

Christopher: Would those be the two kind of levers you are playing with to create that shaping? I think you did a fantastic job there of explaining the kind of resulting shape you would be going for and I think our listeners can probably understand intuitively, yeah, you’re trying to kind of shape or build your climax. I’m sure some of them are wondering like literally, what are you doing to make that happen with rubato playing with the time and dynamics playing with the loud versus quiet? Would those be the two kind of dimensions you were playing with?

Josh: Yes and a third would certainly be voicing, so how vibrant your melody is in comparison to your complement, because a lot of times this is a surprising realization for many students and I’ve been teaching this more and more in the past few years to always keep a melody vibrant. Really in a Chopin, Nocturne, your melody sometimes stays a mezzo forte for a while and I mean with some nuance while the left hand is at a pianissimo, that creates a very atmospheric effect, and then as you grow, maybe your right hand grows up to a forte, but your left hand comes in and it fills it in so much.

That left hand support in regards to the voicing of the right hand over the left hand and how much fill the left hand has in regards to melody can have a big impact on the overall effect of your musicality or interpretation, however you want to word that. That’s certainly one of them and I would say in order. Well, what I would recommend in order, I would first work on your voicing and then I would work on dynamics and then I would work on rubato. I always do that with my own students. I try to get notes, rhythm and articulation and pedaling, right off the bat just right in the first lesson.

I try to make sure all those things are in place and then we start working on voicing next because you can have the most beautiful dynamics and rubato ever, but if your voicing is bad and you can’t hear the melody, you’re going to lose that effect. That’s kind of the sequence of events. I have a YouTube video called the Piano Mastery Checklist where I go through every concept and really piano only comes down to about eight concepts, so notes, rhythm, articulation, pedal, voicing, dynamics, rubato and then finally the last thing I do is tempo.

I guess rubato does play into tempo, but I always tell my students the last time you should worry about is speed. Make sure everything else is in place. Usually, people get their notes and rhythm, then they’re thinking of speed and then they dread out everything else. It’s so hard to do that in a past tempo. It’s better to do it in a slow tempo.

Christopher: That was a wonderful description and I really like before you were talking about your relationships with your teachers, with Sergei Babayan and Susan Duelhmeier, you mentioned that they can help kind of reign in your taste or shape your taste by reigning in something that might have otherwise been going off track and you had a lovely analogy in one of your videos of how use of rubato and dynamics can be a bit like dessert. I don’t know if that is fresh in your memory, but if it is, I’d love you to explain why that might be like dessert.

Josh: Sure, yeah and it can be like a sauce or a spice or anything you want to think of. If you have like a wonderful meal, let’s say, if you’re a meat eater, a nice steak or something and it’s the best kind of steak you could possibly have and let’s say you like steak sauce or a certain spice, well, that can enhance your experience, but if you then pour the whole bottle of spice or sauce or anything onto that steak, it can then ruin it and I think rubato is much like that sauce or spice. It enhances what you’re already doing and it can take you from “Oh, a really good performance” to “Oh, my gosh! that was completely magically and it transformed.”

It’s a necessary component to a very magical performance, but it can be taken to such extremes that it can become distasteful. An example and I personally find it very tasteful the way he manipulates it and I like it a lot because it’s so unique to his style is Cortot. C-O-R-T-O-T. I think his first name is Alfred. I can’t remember exactly. It’s a French name, but Alfred Cortot, he would manipulate things to such a degree that people are very polarized by his performances. They either say, “Oh, this is the greatest thing ever,” or “I hate that,” but I love that he is questioning things. I love that he’s pushing the envelope with every possible detail and I personally love it.

Even though I wouldn’t personally do all of the things that he does, I enjoyed listening to him because it sparks my imagination versus an amateur player that might just be rendering the notes with a little bit of dynamics, okay voicing and hardly any rubato. Even if you find Cortot offensive which like I said I don’t, but if you do, it’s still a more interesting performance than hearing a robotic rendition of something that’s going to offend anyone, but it’s also not really going to inspire anyone.

Christopher: Got you. A moment ago when you laid out the kind of eight elements of piano mastery and the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about in terms of rubato and dynamics, if we think back to maybe midway through your studies with Susan, with all of these kind of second nature to you, I asked because I think a lot of people would assume that to become a high-level performing pianist, most of your journey is about technique and figuring out the fingering and getting very fast and very accurate, but I think much more fascinating is the evolution of your appreciation of these musical aspects, the stuff that actually turns into a moving performance that captivates the listener and I’d love to understand if you can cast your mind back to how much you understand these stuff and appreciate it at that stage in your journey.

Josh: I don’t think I really understood it at all and I think this is something I think you can all feel it. When you hear a great performance, you know that it is special. You know there is something about that so amazing, but I don’t know. Over the years, you’ve come to identify how they’re manipulating those three elements of voicing, dynamics, rubato, because in any professional recording, they’re going to have their notes and rhythm and articulation and pedaling pretty good, but it really comes down to those three concepts of voicing, dynamics and rubato to really set something apart and make it extra special.

For instance, Volodos’s arrangement of the Rachmaninoff, Cello Sonata, why is that one of my favorite pieces ever? Not only it’s a brilliant arrangement, but it’s so nuanced and magical not only with the figurations he writes but how he takes time and how he voices things and where he chooses to inflect the melody. That’s what makes that a special performance for me. This is why you need a teacher especially as an amateur, a growing musician until you reach a high level of professional quality. That’s still why I go see a teacher and that’s why I studied performances of great masters like Sergei Babayan and Daniil Trifonov, Krystian Zimmerman, Martha Argerich, all of these wonderful artists.

That’s why I still go to them on YouTube or in person with Babayan occasionally because they have so much to offer and they have a different perspective on not only the music but on life that gets you thinking in such a unique way. I would highly recommend everybody just type in Babayan, B-A-B-A-Y-A-N, Interview into Google and just go read his articles. His articles will transport you. There are just interviews that random people had done with him, but when you read his thoughts, how he views life, you’re immediately kind of elevated to a higher level and he attributes a lot of that to his teachers in Russia who would do the same thing for him.

I think a whole of this ties back to musicality and how it’s not something that’s innate in any of us. We have tendencies that can be innate and natural, but it takes a lot of refinement and a lot of practice and perseverance to really get to the stage that you want to be at expressing music, and really to be completely honest, that’s only happened in about the last seven or eight years for me. I was about age 22 after some studies with Babayan that I really started to feel like, “Okay, now I’m starting to understand Chopin’s rubato,” and I mean I played all the Chopin etudes.

I played hours and hours of Chopin’s music. I’ve studied for 17 years up to that point, and yet, it was still a bit foreign to me and then I started to gain my own voice. It’s a very difficult task. It’s something that has to be learned very gradually.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. If we jump back then to that period, if you weren’t immersed in this aspect of performance, what was on your mind and what was your journey from that point forward when you were studying with Susan? How did things progress for you?

Josh: Are you talking just about like my education or a specific aspect?

Christopher: As a musician.

Josh: Yeah, I think that I always had the goal to be as great as I could be and I also knew that education is very important because I wanted that door to be open to possibly university teaching at some point if I didn’t want to do that and that door actually opened right after my doctorate. My teacher said, “Will you come fill in for me while I take a sabbatical?” and then they kept me on at the University of Utah which has been a really fun journey, but I think the audience and what they feel and what I feel as a musician has always been at the forefront of why I play music. Is that what you’re asking? I’m not sure what you’re asking.

Christopher: Yeah, I’m curious. What were you focused on from say age 16 to 22 if you weren’t yet really appreciating the musical expression side of things to fullest? I think I asked partly because you have some terrific videos from very early in your YouTube channel about practice technique and about performance and clearly you are very sharp even at that stage in terms of self-awareness and understanding and the techniques and mental models that you can bring to a list. I’m just curious to understand, where that was coming from and what musical life was like in that phase of things?

Josh: Oh, sure yeah. I think I was pushing to the absolute limit even at that age. I think at every age I’ve tried to always get that potential. It was those studies with Babayan that opened my mind to the possibilities of extremes of rubato and kind of abandoning the rules in many ways. I think that’s when I started to make an even greater transformation, and as you get older, you make good transformations, and as you study with different teachers, different things are opened up to you, but I think at that age, I was still pushing as hard as I could. I was still practicing several hours a day, trying to build my repertoire.

That was a really big goal and I remember I hadn’t played a Schubert or Schumann, Sonata, up until my doctorate. I went to my teacher at Michigan. I said, “Look, I have a few holes in my repertoire that I need to round out. Can you help me? I haven’t played much by Brahms. I played his Rhapsody Op. 79 No. 2,” but then we did a set of the Op. 118 pieces, so I think rounding out repertoire with something that I was very passionate about, I was very passionate about competing because competing, I was challenged in a way that just sitting in practice room or playing a concert, competing definitely takes you to a different level than those other tasks and those other endeavors.

That’s something that I was very focused on. I was focused on teaching as well. I started teaching when I was 16 years old and becoming a great teacher was always an interest of mine, so I would continue to try to take my students to the next level and again I owe a lot to my teacher, Susan Duelhmeier because she would occasionally have me tutor her younger students and seeing all her markings in the score and how she would approach teaching these young budding pianists really helped me to know, “Okay, this is how you take someone from not very good to absolutely incredible,” as she kind of has some of magic way of doing it. I still don’t fully understand how she does it. She’s really incredible, but those are types of endeavors that I was engaged in at that age.

Christopher: Got you. I think it’s something reasonably unique to pianists that you are expected both to have an extensive repertoire of some quite lengthy pieces in the classical realm and be able to quite ably sight read whatever is thrown in front of you.

Josh: Sure.

Christopher: And maybe that’s part of what gave you particular insight on this topics, but I wonder if you could just run us through some of the strategies or some of the tips and tricks you have or had developed at that stage to be able to prep a lengthy piece in a short space of time or handle sight reading a level that most people would really struggle with.

Josh: Sure. A few tips on sight reading is try to only look at your music and orient yourself by the three and two black keys on the piano. If you can’t find the G, down look down and find the G. Find the three black keys and then step up from the lowest black key and find that. That will help you kind of get a mental topography of the keyboard and the more you just look at your music and don’t look down at your hands, the more independent you’ll be, so I hardly ever look down at my hands at this point when I start reading unless there’s a big jump or something that I’m a little nervous about.

That’s just some practical tips and to prepare a lot of material in a short amount of time, I like to plan things out and say, “Okay, I need to be ready by this date,” and over the last year or two, I’ve kind of upped my game with that and actually I think that kind of shows in my performances over the last two years. I think I’ve had more successful performances than I ever have before, not that they’re flawless because they certainly aren’t. I still have little flaws in my performances, but I’ve come up with a plan that I want to try to get as close to 10 performances before each actual concert as I can and this is for newer works.

I mean if I’m playing the First Blood I can bring that back in pretty much in an hour and be ready to go because I’ve played it so many different times throughout my life, but for Rachmaninoff, Third Concerto, or the Saint-Saens that I recently played or the Chopin, Grande Polonaise, that I just played with Symphony or the Beethoven, Choral Fantasy, all four of those performances were with orchestra and they were all this year and that was a lot of material for me. I usually might have one or two orchestra performances in a year tops. It’s quite rare to play with orchestra, but there was four this year and so I tried to do those 10 performances, and so far as getting the repertoire ready I would specific plans, but within those plans, it takes a lot of nitty-gritty tiny sectioned off work.

Most people when they have a lot of material to prepare, they panic, so they start playing through their whole program every day at a very low level, so by the time they get to their performance, they haven’t made much progress because they’ve overwhelmed themselves. It’s like drinking from a fire hose, that cliche. You’re trying to devour as much water as you can and then you actually hardly get any at all. If you actually break it down and take little tiny sections to perfection, hands alone and hands together.

Most people would say, that’s going to take way to long, I’ll never finish, but it’s actually a really good way of doing things because if you get that section perfect and actually get it to a pretty high tempo, maybe even beyond your full tempo, then when you leave that alone it move on to the next section, that kind of stays at a pretty high level. I’d like to think of it in terms of temperature, Heinrich Neuhaus, an amazing pedagogue from Russia said that, “It’s like boiling water. If you actually boiled a water it purifies it and it stays pure, whereas if you only heat it up to a certain temperature and it never boils, it cools down and it’s never purified.”

He said, he was teaching one of his students, Sviatoslav Richter particularly difficult Prokofiev, Sonata passage, and he said, “How did you get that so good?” He said, “I practiced without ceasing on those few measures for two hours,” and here is Richter, one of the greatest pianists in history and he had to practice a passage for over two hours. I’m sure it was not like a three-page passage. I bet it was like two or three measures, very small and getting those to the high level gives you confidence to move on, put that aside, move on to your next section and then at the end of the day or the end of the week, put everything together and it will still hold up. I promise it will. Most adult students, and since you said your audience is mostly amateur adults, do not fall into this trap. It’s tragic when people fall into this trap. They think, “Oh, my gosh! I’ve worked the last six months on this [BA 00:45:17] Convention. I can’t possibly let it go because I’ve worked too hard on it.”

Then they add this to this daily routine, and after a couple of years of studying, they have this routine of 20 pieces. They need to get three [inaudible 00:45:33] so they don’t forget and then they never actually accomplished anything, so they have really good initial studies. When they go to a new teacher, they work on a brand new piece and they see a lot of progress, but then as their studies increase and they’ve never let pieces go, only work on two or three things at once. Unless you’re literally preparing for a recital, then you have to bring everything back but really shouldn’t be bringing things back way in advance of a recital, maybe two or three months tops bring things back but only focus on two or three things at once and that would really help your progress rather than trying to juggle way too many pieces. Sorry, that was pretty wordy, but I hope that gives you some insight.

Christopher: Perfect!

Josh: Yeah.

Christopher: Yeah, excellent! I wonder if we could take a little deeper even. Can you take us in to just one of those practice sessions maybe for yourself or if you imagine yourself standing behind one of your students, helping them have the perfect practice session one evening? What would that 30 or 60 minutes look like? What would they be doing in terms of approaching pieces and working on their repertoire?

Josh: Sure. I would say if they have an hour and they working on a substantial work, don’t try to do more than one work at a time, so I would say, “You know? Get the whole hour to that piece and then also identify section.” The thing I would tell them not to do is do not start out by playing through the whole piece. That’s the worst use of your time at the beginning of your practice session because it tires out your mind. At least, it does to me. A lot of teachers say that. Play through the piece, kind of see where things go wrong and then work on the bad parts. I just do the opposite.

I record myself at the end of the practice session and then you start your practice session by listening to yourself and marking up your score and then you go to those sections. Within a section, I might say, “Okay, I want to work on this page in this next hour or these two pages. Okay, now. Where are my weakest spots?” I’ll go right to those spots and I will actually try to identify the very note that things started to go wrong with and then I’ll build out and do just an add-on type exercise, so one note beyond the mistake, one note before the mistake, two notes beyond mistake, two notes before and pretty soon, you put things back to a larger context and the problem has resolved itself.

We could go way deep into lots of different technical practices that I used, but that’s my basic method for fixing issues and how I practice, and then once I’ve gone through and I’ve fixed each problem spot, then I might play through that whole section a couple of times and see how it goes, and if there’s still problem, I might go back and fix them again and then at the end of the session, I’ll play through the whole piece, record it or maybe just a section. If I just want to focus on that section again tomorrow, maybe I’ll just focus on that. I remember when I was preparing Rach 3 it was very scary because I performed first and third movement by the end of December.

My performance was the end of January, but the end of December is coming and I still don’t have second movement memorized and I’m like, “Oh, my gosh!” and it’s so difficult. The second movement is so hard to memorize and so I said, “Okay, well, I’m abandoning first to third movement for the next two weeks,” and I’m only four weeks away for my performance so I can really get that second movement down and then I worked like crazy the third week to pull everything together and it came together and actually the week of the performance I almost felt a little bit bored.

I thought, “What would I work on? I feel ready,” but it was because I have the courage to just zone in or laser focus on that second movement and then move on to the first and third movement which were already in pretty good shape.

Christopher: I see and I did ask specifically about repertoire there, but I noticed you didn’t say spend the first 30 minutes of your practice playing scales and Hanon until your fingers are a bit tired. What was your perspective on that? Like, how would you balance that kind of pure technique exercise with the more artistic and repertoire-based practice?

Josh: Sure. I apologize, I don’t mean that you shouldn’t do technical exercises. I was giving that example as if you were just working on one piece, so I don’t mind at all if students warm up with some exercises, I generally 20 or 30 minutes tops. Even if you’re doing four or five hours a day, I would still recommend only 20 to 30 minutes of dedicated exercises because you should be able to find exercises that you can do in your pieces. You should be studying things that will develop your technique rather than just playing scales endlessly.

You need to have practical examples, so maybe study a Chopin etude or a Liszt etude or Rachmaninoff, Concerto, or something that will challenge you technically. Now having said that, it’s been really interesting as many people who are familiar with my channel know I do a paid series called ProPractice like where I sell individual videos of the whole course and I’ve been rounding out my beginner section these past couple of weeks with just basic exercises, Schmitt and Hanon exercises, but it doesn’t involve me going through and just saying, “Hey! Let’s just play fast and loud.” Every single video, I try to hone in on a new concept.

Today, we’re going to do long short rhythms. Tomorrow, we’re going to focus on counting when we are playing these exercises which most people don’t count their exercises. It’s so basic, but the point I’m trying to drive home is when you’re practicing an exercise, make sure that you’re actually developing another skill just beside strengthening your fingers and getting “warmed up.” Rather than just warming up your muscles like you’re warming up for a workout or something, think of it as, “Okay, this is my time to take a very easy exercise,” easy meaning to read it, most exercises are in some type of pattern or predictable figuration or something. “It’s not hard to read an exercise, but let me make it more challenging by practicing a method, a practice method that will help me in this really tough passage I have coming up at one of my pieces.”

That’s the best use of time when you’re practicing exercises rather than just mindlessly going through it, like I heard someone, I can’t remember maybe it was Glenn Gould, I can’t remember but someone said, “You know? I’ve seen students read a novel while they make their way through the 60 Hanon exercises to warm up each day.” That is not a good use of time because you’re not stimulating your mind if you’re reading a book. You want to be applying an exercise that can help you in your repertoire.

Christopher: Fantastic! Well, that was certainly something that jumped out at me from your ProPractice course was that yes, you’re teaching scales in that kind of pure technique, but you mentioned, “Every time we’re going to do a little bit different. We’re going to be throwing in something new,” and I think that’s a wonderful way to kind of get double the value from your time spent on the technical exercises.

Josh: Sure.

Christopher: Supposing you put in your practice for a few weeks or months even to really nail a piece of repertoire and the times comes for the big performance, how would you go about preparing for that? What’s going on in your head before the performance and during the performance to let you be at the top of your game?

Josh: I think a lot of trust that things will go well is a prerequisite. If you go in trying to overanalyze things, you’re going to sabotage your performance and one thing that I really liked was two pianists that I admire greatly, Claire Huangci and Daniil Trifonov, they both had interviews that I really liked. In Claire’s interview, she said, “I try to think of my mind as a blank slate and my creative impulses are all that’s left,” so I’m not thinking, “Oh, is that D Minor chord coming up?” You can. If you’re really nervous about something, you can still have landmarks of like, “Yeah, this D Minor chord is coming up,” but you’re not overanalyzing and saying, “What’s that next note? What’s that next note? Oh, this is hard part coming up.”

You’re not doing that. Your mind is at peace. It’s blank and then your creative impulses kind of improvise what you’re going to do dynamically in your performance. Now, when I say improvise, it can be planned out, “Oh, I can do this with my dynamics or this or this,” but then when you get to the performance, you do what you’re inspired to do and that’s why I love performing. A lot of times, you’re under all this pressure, but then that forces you to be at your most creative state. Another thing Daniil Trifonov said in one of his interviews, I think it’s on Medici TV, if anybody wants to check that one out, but he said, “When I perform, I feel this current working up inside of me that I have to share with the audience, I have to share this experience and this journey with them,” and I actually watched that interview.

I had that interview bookmarked to watch, but I watched it like two hours before my Rachmaninoff, Third Concerto, performance and I feel like it was one of my more successful performances I have ever given and it was because I was concerned about sharing. I was thinking of everything that he said during that performance and it was no longer about me. It was no longer about my own insecurities. Getting rid of yourself in your performances is one of the most crucial things to success. Stop thinking about yourself. Stop thinking about what you struggle with and instead think about sharing with that audience and enjoying the experience to yourself and enjoying the music.

You’re playing this wonderful. Why are you thinking of yourself when you have this amazing music that you’re going to play? When you start to do that and that’s harsh advice, I’m not saying you’re a selfish terrible person if you’re thinking of your own insecurities, it’s a natural human inclination, but if you can quiet your mind, get rid of negative self-talk, stop thinking of yourself and start thinking of the music and sharing this beautiful experience, performing becomes a joy and it’s no longer scary, it’s no longer nerve-wracking. It’s actually just fun at that point.

Anxious anticipation is how Daniil talked about it in his interview. It’s not that you don’t have butterflies going on in your chest or anything, but it’s not this feeling that, “I want to go throw up because I’m so nervous, I’m going to die. I can barely breathe.” I’ve had that feeling before. Actually at the Chopin National Competition, it was in 2010. I was playing Mazurkas and I was so nervous and it was like hard for me to breathe. I felt like I was suffocating almost. I’m so nervous and the second time through, I said, “I don’t care what these judges think. I’m just going to play my very best. They can pass me onto the next round or not, but I’m going to enjoy this experience. I’m going to share this. I’m playing for the audience, not the judges. I don’t care.”

Then I ended up placing in that competition whereas the first time when I was so scared I got caught after the second round. Your own perception about the performance experience has a great deal to do with the outcome. It does not only have to do with how many hours you practice because I’ve seen students overly prepared for a performance completely botched it because they got into their head and I’ve also seen students who are really not prepared but they have those nerves of steel and they don’t care what people think. They actually make it through their performances fairly successfully even though they are little unprepared. A lot of it is mental at that stages. It’s not just practice time.

Christopher: How did you make that mindset flip? You gave an example there where you did it once and you were not in the right head game for it and you came back again with a completely different attitude. What changed in the meantime? If someone’s listening and thinking, “Oh, yeah. I wish I have that kind of attitude to performance.” How did you get there?

Josh: Yeah, a lot of it is practice performing. Practicing performing, so putting yourself in those situations. I don’t want to sabotage myself as much as I can. Before Carnegie Hall, I wanted Carnegie Hall to be super successful. My friend invited me to play half of her concert. She said, “You know? I don’t really have enough repertoire for this concert. It’s in a month or two. Would you mind playing half of the concert with me?” I said, “Yeah, sure. I’d love to.” So we played at Zankel Hall at Carnegie and I said, “This has to be my most successful performance ever,” so I would do crazy things.

Like it was in the middle of winter in Michigan and I’d go out and I’d make snowballs and cover my hands with snow until I couldn’t feel them anymore and then I go to the hot practice rooms and I played a lot of La Campanella and my hands would be like warming up and they’d be completely numbed and warming up halfway through or I would play … These ideas came from Logan Skelton, my teacher at Michigan. He said, “You want to sabotage yourself?” So I tried to come up with this many weird ways of doing this or playing right when you wake up in the morning when you’re tired or right before you go to sleep or after you’ve had a terrible day or any type of negative experience you can possibly think of.

Try to perform under those circumstances so that when you finally do get to your performance, “Oh, my gosh! You’re warmed up. You’re on a beautiful piano. You’re comfortable. It’s a warm room,” it’s a walk in the park at that point. It’s so easy. Babayan told me, this is a funny story. He said … He was one of the judges at the Chopin Competition. I think it was a rule that you couldn’t have studied with one of the judges for three years or something and we haven’t done a lesson for three years, so it was legit. Anyone listening to those feel like, “Oh, yeah favoritism,” whatever, but it was a legit.

Anyways, afterwards, we have a good relationship together, but he said, “Oh, my goodness. Your first round was incredible. We all thought you would win First Prize and I walked off stage, told the other judges but the other judges said, ‘I love this boy,’ and I said, ‘You know what? I love him too. He’s amazing.’ Second round, still very good. Third round, oh, my goodness! You come out and you play those Mazurkas better than anyone in the competition. That’s why you got the Mazurka Prize. It was unbelievable, and then what a pity! Your fourth and final round, you walked on stage like scared little boy, I thought, ‘Oh, no. Joshua will come out of this,’ but you never did. Your Mazurkas were so good, we couldn’t give you Sixth Prize,” because there’s six finalists, “so we gave you Fifth.”

He said, “Let this be a lesson. You always start with last round first and you work backwards from there towards the first round. I remember I did something very similar. I played all of my best repertoire, Queen Elizabeth Competition and I thought I was going to be so special by playing Rach 3 for a final round. I played Gaspard de la nuit. I played Pictures at an Exhibition or something, he named this wonderful repertoire and he said, “I made it to final round and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness! I didn’t plan on making it to finals. I had Rach 3 to still master,’ so I was practicing 23 hours per day, getting one hour of sleep trying to get this ready and every single judge came up to me and said, ‘You were supposed to win. What a disappointment that your Rach 3 was so unprepared,’ and I never did that again, and so I always prepare my last round first, so next competition I went to,” I can’t remember what competition.

He won like first try in like five consecutive huge competitions, he was amazing, but he said, “I was like Liszt Concerto. It was so in my hands. It was so perfect that the day of the performance, I played video games and I went home and I walk and I won because it was so prepared because I started with last round first.” So funny but anyway, I forgot even what you said. I was getting so off track. What was the question again?

Christopher: It was about preparing for performances.

Josh: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Christopher: I loved what you said that the advice to sabotage yourself is phenomenal and I think what you just said there reminds me of a really excellent tip from one of your videos and I want to be respectful of your time, so I wouldn’t ask you about it now, but we’ll put link in the show notes because you’ve got some great advice on why you should practice pieces from the end back to the beginning rather than vice versa. You should practice them in reverse in those sections and we’ll put a link in the show notes. I’m just going to tease everyone with that.

Josh: Sure. The last piece of advice is a book that you can each read which is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle which is an amazing book all about living in the moment, but some of the imagery that he gets in that book really helped me with performance, so I wanted to mention that as well.

Christopher: Interesting. I’ve read that book and loved it but I’ve not thought about it from a music performance perspective. I will have to revisit it.

Josh: Sure.

Christopher: I did want to ask you one final question before I let you go on the topic of performing because in an example like you just gave where things are going great, you’ve got yourself ready, you’ve got yourself in the right mindset, but then on the day, things do not go according to plan, how do you handle that because I know that’s something that trips a lot of musicians out is if they’re starting with a completely blank slate, they can get themselves psyched up, they can get themselves prepared, it’s all fine, but then when the performance doesn’t go well and you’re midway through the performance or the next day when you’re trying to recover your motivation, how do you think about mistakes or problematic performances and how to move on?

Josh: Sure. You can go watch and laugh at my Beethoven, Choral Fantasy performance. It actually overall was pretty good, but one page in, I had a memory slip. It’s on the Fantasy part where it’s piano solo and it’s with a choir nonetheless, so you probably have like a 150 musicians on stage with you and the whole audience, a couple of thousands of people are there watching you and you messed up your first page in and I recovered. I just kept going, but I walked off the stage pretty much saying like, “Yeah, I’m ready to quite piano. That was so stupid.”

This was just this past May or March or something, anyway and my wife was like, “That was not that bad,” and I was like, “No, I’m sick of this. I’m sick of not playing my very best. Why can I not do this? There are all these 17-year-olds winning these international competitions and here I am 30 and I’ve played my whole life. Why can I not do this?” First of all, it’s normal for everyone at whatever stage they might be to experience this, but then you get back to why you’re playing piano in the first place. You love the music.

You love what type of mindset it puts you in, where it takes you, where it transports you, and then when you get back to the fundamentals like that, the basics of why am I doing this, that gives you the motivation to continue whereas if you just base your continuing playing lessons or whatever instruments you’re playing or continuing just studying the piano on your own, if you’re not taking lessons, if you base that on the quality of your performances, much of it is something that you can’t control because some of that performance anxiety and the negative performance experience, some of that is spontaneous and some of it is out of control because we don’t know how we’ll react in every situation, so it’s a learning experience.
You’re learning about yourself. I always try to get back to why I’m studying music in the first place. What I’m trying to accomplish through this and a lot of it is personal satisfaction, and if I have a bad performance, yeah, I’m not personally satisfied, but maybe I’ll just go and play it for my wife after that and play it really successfully and okay, now I can move on. I don’t have to end it with a sour taste in my mouth with this particular piece, so getting back to that, listening to great recordings and sometimes just taking a break from piano, sometimes I’ll take a week off after a huge performance and that kind of recharges your motivation as well. So don’t be afraid to take a break every now and again especially after big performances.

Christopher: Wonderful! Really terrific advice there that I wish I could go back in time and give myself and my teenage years. Josh, we’ve mentioned your YouTube Channel and your ProPractice Course, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about both of those.

Josh: Sure. I have a YouTube Channel that I started back in 2009, so it’s almost 10 years old and I’ve just started it to give tips to my young students, so I could say, “Go watch that video if you want more tips on this particular technique,” and then I started doing these full-length tutorials that I call ProPractice, actually at the request of one of my YouTube viewers and he said, “I’d love to see you step through a whole piece,” so I sold those for about $9 on my website and actually I just launched all of my videos on a new platform called Teachable, which is kind of cool.

It allows you to download the videos, view them offline on iPhone, iPad, progress track. It’s just a better platform, so you can learn all about that at my website, joshwrightpiano.com, and if you’re interested in the full ProPractice videos and there are several hundred free YouTube videos as well that are just under Josh Wright Piano TV. If you just go to my channel, it’s Josh Wright Piano TV, that will kind of give you a guide to everything, and if you’re interested in full-length courses, I’ve created those as well.

Christopher: Tremendous, well, we’ll certainly have a link in the show notes to several of the videos I’ve made reference to and we’ve talked a little bit about on these topics like performing and practicing more effectively and bringing musicality to your playing and obviously if you are a piano player yourself or a piano teacher even that you’re going to get even more tremendous value from Josh’s channel. Whether or not you’re a pianist, definitely do get check it out. Josh, it’s been such a pleasure to talk with you today. A big thank you for joining us on the show.

Josh: Thank you so much for having me. I hope something in there was helpful to each of you in your studies.

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The post Practice, Performance, and Powerful Levers, with Josh Wright appeared first on Musical U.