Practice Makes

A good friend and fellow musician aims at practicing for four hours on the day off that he's given himself by cutting down on his work load. He has a series of books of exercises based on scales, and he is trying to increase the speed at which he can play them. What is his aim? To get as good as he can, as close as possible to a professional level on his instrument. He doesn't practice four hours straight, but he tries to accumulate that time over the hours of his day off from work.

I try to practice for an hour every day, and that tires me out. I guess I could put my instrument aside, do something else, and then come back to it, but I don't. Would I gain anything by practicing more? Aspiring professional musicians - I'm thinking of the documentary I saw with Alfred Brendel mentoring a young Asian-American pianist, Kit Armstrong, and advising him to increase his practice time to four hours - practice all day long, but I imagine that they're learning new pieces all the time, and that takes a huge amount of work. I feel that, after an hour, I've reached the point of diminishing returns.

I do play scales and other exercises, and I also work on new pieces, but not a lot of them, and not with the idea of performing them. I work on them to appreciate them. And my purpose in practicing is to play more and more musically.

Playing music is like acting a part in a play. You express emotions that you wouldn't feel if you weren't playing the part. You aren't faking the emotions. They're somewhere inside you. You're giving yourself the opportunity of expressing something you might ordinarily keep to yourself or be unaware of.

Isn't that what all art does for us?