Parkinson’s Law and the Practice Room
Parkinson’s Law - a task expands to fill the time allotted, regardless of the amount of work to be done.
If you would like to see Parkinson’s Law in action, observe practice rooms of school music buildings across the United States. Today, I want to present something that can push back against C. Northcote Parkinson and his law!
Inspect - Dismantle - Reassemble
My office at Arkansas State is in a central location upstairs, close to the practice rooms and student social area. I hear quite a few students playing through their lesson assignments, but I hear very few actually practicing. Time is at a premium for everyone these days, and this kind of practicing actually slows down progress. The “top left to bottom right” approach to practicing is common, but it doesn’t mean that it’s effective or efficient. I hope that the following approach helps you. Let’s dive in!
Step One: Inspect
By recording a run of the musical selection, you accomplish a couple of things right away. First, you are performing for an audience, even if it is just a recorder. Second, you can focus all of your energy on creation. If you play and judge at the same time, you have to split your energies between both. Listening back after the fact, with pencil in hand, allows you to have multiple passes over a single take, which can help improve your ears. Circle or otherwise mark your mistakes.
Step Two: Dismantle
The next step is to focus in on the first of the marked mistakes that we handled in the previous step. Play just those problem notes. Usually, if you are splitting a single note over and over, there are one of two culprits - your breath, or the note immediately before the problem note. “Reverse engineer” the problem. Experiment! Be creative. Check your pulse against a metronome. What is the likely, most straightforward solution? Start there!
An abacus or a handful of coins on your music stand can be really helpful here. Set out to play the chosen passage correctly ten times in a row. If you make a mistake, the counter goes back to zero and you start over. When you are able to play it correctly ten times, you can move on to the next step.
Step Three: Reassemble
Your shiny, rehabilitated passage can now be plugged back into the larger measure or phrase. Is it working now? Can you play the entire phrase ten times? If so, congratulations! If not, go back to “Extract” and focus on other possible solutions until you can play the passage successfully several times in a row.
The beauty of this approach is that in most cases, you only need a couple of practice sessions to actually fix the problem, and then you can get to the next task sooner. Traditionally, an entire piece of music limps along with small improvements week after week after week. How accomplished would you feel if you could walk away today or tomorrow knowing not only how it goes, but knowing that you can play it?