JAVS Spring 2024

This process required that I take a step back and learn how to hold myself accountable for the issues that most bothered me in my own playing, which reflected the exact issues that bothered me in my students’ playing: a haphazard approach to the physical details in tone production, an indifference to the refinement of bow technique, and the inability to judge whether or not my own sound under my ear was adequate, much less beautiful. I made two commitments to myself: 1. to make some kind of sound on my instrument every single day even if it was only open strings for 10 minutes 2. to seek external feedback from performers whose playing I admired and wanted to emulate I was inspired by the 19th and early 20th century French food writer, Édouard de Pomiane, who wrote in French Cooking in 10 Minutes , “When you go into the kitchen, first put a pot of water to boil. I don’t know what you’ll use it for, but you’ll use it for something.” 3 It becomes exponentially more difficult to carve out time on one’s instrument amid real-life occurrences while building a career. I recognized that there were a few daily rituals in my life that were non-negotiable, like brushing my teeth. Once I was able to organize the list of those daily non-negotiable activities to include a minimum of 10 minutes on my instrument, I have been able to maintain that commitment through holidays, travel days, and childbirth in a hospital. Each night, I would write a list for the following day at my nightstand before going to sleep, scheduling my practice time on that list; as is typical, once I got started I always ended up spending more time on my instrument than anticipated. It became an unexpected game to see the little green smiley face on my tuning app as I tracked my consistency. I found an accountability partner in a friend willing to listen and give feedback completely free of my internal need to impress them. I also began taking auditions again, and recorded my rounds when allowed. Refining my technical ability in a 25 second orchestral excerpt provided different parameters than preparing a 30-minute sonata with a collaborator. As psychologically draining as auditions can be, the anonymity of the screen provided a way to separate myself from the personal attachment to a performance. Ironically, I did not have to worry about the external judgment of playing poorly once I separated my goals of improving specific technique from the outcome of winning.

It further dawned on me that performing under pressure is a different mental skillset than practicing in the comfort of home, the focus of Noa Kageyama’s website and courses, the Bulletproof Musician. My practicing needed to be strategically retooled to provide more mental focus and physical freedom while playing under pressure. Cellist Gregory Beaver makes the case that “we do not practice to get better, we practice to notice more.” 4 I therefore incorporated breathing exercises into my regime, and added 10 minutes of meditation to my day to develop more mental control. Arguably, the most important part of this process has been understanding the role of mentorship. An orchestral colleague recommended finding a coach, referring to an article on coaching in The New Yorker , “The Coach in the Operating Room.” The author, Atul Gawande makes the case that surgeons should pursue coaching just as top athletes and singers have coaches for the duration of their careers. He states, “no matter how well-trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.” 5 Even though I finished my degree programs almost a decade ago, I still wanted a set of external ears to help me diagnose and analyze what I was doing to generate the sound quality that was coming out of my instrument, beyond my own rudimentary recordings on my smartphone speaker. I played for titled and respected players from orchestras who have distinctive string sounds, each of them offering valuable feedback, thus demonstrating the value of having a coach listen and critique my playing in real time. Results: What have I learned? What am I learning? Each performer I played for was actively teaching in addition to their primary performance jobs. Their feedback became a conglomerate class on advanced bowing techniques and the idiosyncrasies of how to maximize what my instrument and bow were capable of. In this process, I realized that refining my mental focus was far more necessary than pure skill acquisition and repetition. Being able to produce a sound I was proud of required a directed, active, and completely focused mind frame while practicing, so that I could stay focused during performances when my propensity for being distracted typically skyrocketed. It required that I have a structure: having a musical intention I wanted to express and having a clear concept of sound that I was aiming for.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2024