Is there anything you should change about your practice?

Our daily practice is our path to progress. It's how we develop mastery of our instrument and increase our understanding of music in general.

Shinichi Suzuki's famous quote,"Practice only on the days you eat," illustrates so vividly the importance of making practice a daily routine.

But anything we do every day can become so routine that...

What is your musical signature? Maybe you've never given it any thought, but I can assure you that you have one. So how do you find it, or refine, or even define it?

Handwritten signatures are special. I remember practicing mine when I was a teenager, mostly when I was doodling during class. What did I want it to look like? I experimented with slanting my letters to the right and to the left,...

 Augmented Fourth

Musical dissonance occurs when two notes played simultaneously have a clash of wills. The notes just don’t play well together. The interval shown here is the classic example of a dissonant interval: an augmented fourth, a tritone.

Hundreds of years ago, dissonance was essentially prohibited in music. The perceived conflict between tones was held to be incompatible...

If you were stranded on a desert island and could have with you the music of only one composer, whose music would you pick?

It’s an old question, and one I almost always find difficult to answer. I love so much music, it is almost impossible to narrow my choices to one. But inevitably, my thoughts do circle back around to one composer: Johann Sebastian Bach.

On a recent trip to Germany, I...

Set the bar low for your next performance.  What?!

We are taught to aim for the best possible performance. We are accustomed to setting the bar high and going for the gold. And that's a good thing, right?

Not necessarily.

Sometimes setting the bar high can create more pressure, more self-induced pressure. We practice harder and longer as the performance gets closer, and we sweat the...

I won't say I told you so, but...

I was reading a post on one of my favorite music blogs, The Bulletproof Musician, and was so excited to find someone else talking about one of my favorite subjects: aural skills.

The latest post begins by exploring the very real benefits of mental practice, meaning practice away from the instrument. My students have heard me talk about this before.

It’s one thing to talk about focus, and another thing entirely to find it. You can practice with focus and perform with focus, but what if you don’t really have something specific to focus on? How long can you create focus for yourself?

Focus, motivation, drive, inspiration. They are all slightly different manifestations of the same important element in music study: energy.

...

This blog post is the second in a three-part series of case studies that will show you how to bring more focus – and more harp happiness – into your practice and playing every day.

In last week’s post, Agatha learned how to stay more focused during her practice time and reduce the mental clutter that was preventing her from doing her best work.

In this week’s...

Wouldn't it be great if you could make your practice more productive, more rewarding and more enjoyable? If you could magnify the results you got each time you practice?

It's possible - with focus.

Just like a magnifying glass can focus the sun's rays, you can focus your energies in your practice to get the kind of results you want.

This blog post is the first in a series of case studies that...

Center for the Arts, University of Delaware Photo by Jon Fox

(This post about college choices first appeared several years ago, but it's that time of year again. Here's to making a smart choice!)

With the incredible variety and number of options, how do you make a good college choice? How can you find the right music program to get you where you want to go? Is a music conservatory the...