If I Were Gollum, I’d Say, “My Practice!”
Music practice and I have had a long, complicated, dysfunctional relationship. I love practice, I really do, but it has taken many years to realize this. We have not always gotten along.
As a kid taking piano lessons at seven years old, I avoided practicing. I hated practicing, with that intense passion only children feel for things they despise.
To give you some idea of the setting: The piano I played was a vertical piano that lived in the TV room of our house. In addition to housing the television and piano, the room connects to the patio and kitchen, and is right next to the garage where my dad would come in from working in his shop. It is a busy place in the house, always with people coming in or out, or sitting nearby. The lower level of the house is fairly open, so sound travels easily. All this meant there was always someone to hear me when I played the piano. This eventually proved to be a problem.
You see, aside from the typical kid reasons for disliking practice time — too boring, too slow, too repetitive — I had one specific reason for avoiding piano practice:
I did not want anyone to hear me.
I would wait to play until the house was empty but for me and the cat. If anyone happened to be in the house, I would refuse to play. If I were somehow guilted into practicing with someone present, I would play very, very quietly for as short a duration as I could get away with. I actually mastered playing silently, with the quiet thuds of the keys themselves being the only sign I was not just sitting in front of the piano, daydreaming. Of course, this was practically worthless in terms of the practice quality, but that did not matter to me then; what mattered was technically “practicing” while still being too quiet to hear.
Flute was another issue. It is difficult to make a bad sound hitting one note on a piano — you press the key, it sounds the note. Wind instruments are a whole different animal. Fingering, breath control, embouchure, it all matters, and if one thing is not quite right, the sound turns ugly. My first months learning flute were filled with breathy, screechy, shrill sounds. I don’t know how my parents maintained their sanity. While I disliked playing piano with anyone in the house, I did not want anyone in the same county while I was making such terrible sounds on my flute.
Even now, I am self-conscious of my practice time. I love my accordion, but I am well aware that it is not the world’s most popular instrument. As one of my friends pointed out, there is no Silent Brass for the accordion, nor a volume knob, so any honest playing is going to make some noise. I remain convinced that unwanted noise will anger people. Even the most enjoyable of music sounds horrible when you are trying to study, or when it prevents your children from sleeping. It does not help matters that I am usually most inspired to practice sometime around 10 PM, when most people want quiet. It is the same situation for any other instrument I want to play; I feel that my imperfect playing will annoy or irritate those listening, and I do not wish to do that, particularly when they did not opt in to hearing my confused musical mashings.
I have trouble understanding why someone would enjoy listening to an inherently flawed practice session, particularly mine. My parents always claimed to enjoy hearing me practice, (possibly because it meant their investments were not being completely wasted) but I never bought it. If you are listening to someone practice so you can listen to the music, prepare for imperfection, because pretty much anyone less than a virtuoso is going to have some noticeable flubs at some point. Sometimes it is almost painful for me to listen to another amateur practicing — the stops and starts, the repeated missteps, the complete disregard for dynamics. It throws off how lost I can get in the music if the person I am listening too has to stop and fix something. I tend to assume that if something bothers me, then it probably bothers someone else too; if I wouldn’t enjoy listening to myself, then no one else will either.
Practice is not perfect. It’s not even really music, at least not the way I do it. Repetition is the soul of my practice. I warm up by playing scales over and over and over. I get a metronome and go over the trouble spots in a song, each hand separately, slowly, again and again, until I can play them perfectly. Then I speed up just a little and repeat. Practice is my time to work on the problems and wear away the rough edges, which inevitably means detail work. I imagine that listening to someone play the same two measures of music fifty times in a row, at one-quarter the speed of the song, gets very annoying very quickly.
What throws me off most about practice is my own personal definition:
If anyone is listening, it is a performance.
And performance has a completely different set of rules.
Practice and performance are diametrically opposed, almost antagonistic. They cannot exist in the same space. With practice, it is not only ok to fail, it’s expected; a performance should be flawless. Practice is repetitive: you go over problem spots over and over, slowly, carefully, again and again and again until your fingers and subconscious have absorbed the melody, know it by heart, can move exactly as needed. With a performance, you get one shot. All-or-nothing, it must be perfect. Practice is a time of learning; performance is a time of demonstrating what you know.
Having someone watch me practice completely breaks my concentration most of the time. My brain jumps around: “Go away. This is my practice time, and very personal, so I don’t want you here,” to “I hope they don’t mind me playing this part again,” to “Oh crap, I have to go full-speed and perfect and not stop and not telegraph stop to work on my mistakes because someone is listening therefore this is a performance!” Just knowing someone is within earshot is enough to make me switch from practice mode to performance mode. And performance mode is for performances; it is not designed for learning or improvement, but for show. Go through, play your best, and keep going despite any mistakes you make. Never let the audience know if you made a mistake through your expressions or actions. If you don’t let them know you messed up, most of your audience won’t be able to tell.
Having a listener is enough to make me dislike a practice session for the simple reason that they will be listening to something less than perfect. If I were ready for an audience, then I would say as much. I would be ready to give a proper performance, the listener would get a proper concert, and we would all be happier with the result. Instead, they will hear something half-finished, rushed, and awkward because I am not prepared to perform, yet I feel compelled to because they are listening.
Having an audience during practice also somehow feels…too intimate. For me, sitting and listening to someone else practice feels too intrusive, almost voyeuristic. Watching a true musician with their instrument is like watching two long-separated lovers reunite. Lost in each other’s presence, you and the rest of the world are not there to them; there is only the musician and the instrument, and the music they make. Witnessing that moment is a privilege. So beautiful and entrancing it is to watch and to hear, yet I can’t help but think to myself, “I should not be here. This is not meant for my eyes to see.” Something so personal, so raw, is not worthy of the casual observer. Perhaps I am weird to feel this way, but I do.
Practice and I have a difficult relationship. I refuse to make time for us to spend together. I procrastinate, I dally, I try to make up for lost time with marathon sessions that do more harm than good. Practice, in turn, makes me relearn my technique, gives me no results for days at a stretch. Much of the time I get frustration, and boredom, and annoyance in return for even my most diligent efforts. My relationship with music practice mirrors that of my relationship with music as a whole: confusing and uncertain, with begging and fights, gifts and peace offerings, breakups and reconciliations. We are one of those couples for whom it seems everything keeps going wrong.
Yet we can’t seem to stay apart.
Music In Your Soul 
I never thought of it that way, but that is exactly how I feel when training for a new job. As soon as I am left alone, I can do it all. Once someone else is there, I ask questions on things I know because for some reason, I’d rather look like I know nothing, than know it imperfectly. Not quite same situation, but I do know the feeling.
Performance anxiety applies to a lot of things, I think. Performance anxiety and perfectionism are an odd combination.
Glad to hear someone else has the same sort of thoughts!