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A blog about performing music, teaching music and the business of music.
Filtering by Category: Quote
"Only those who are asleep make no mistakes."
- Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, worlds largest furniture brand
Make mistakes in the practice room.
Make mistakes on the podium.
Make mistakes on your career path.
Or sleep a lot.
"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action."
-Herbert Spencer
I was always taught that if you want to evaluate your belief systems examine your actions and not your thoughts.
If you are an aspiring orchestral musician and you don't play your first notes of the day until 11:00 then you believe that you don't need to start playing early in the morning in order to win a job.
If you are a music education major who doesn't record yourself conducting except when you are required to for a class then you believe you can become a good enough conductor to get and keep a top job without doing so.
If you are a musician who is not great at sight reading and you don't practice it each and every day then you believe that you will eventually get a break in the business that will not involve needing to be great at sight reading.
Believe your actions over your words.
"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple really. Double your rate of failure."
-Thomas J Watson (Founder of IBM)
You will fail many, many times before you succeed.
So get busy failing...
"You can't win unless you learn how to lose."
—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hall of Fame Basketball Player
"An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field."
—Niels Bohr, Atomic Physicist and Nobel Prize Winner
In the music world (especially the classical corner of that world) we are taught to never, ever make mistakes:
There are hundreds of these rules.
The problem is this mindset completely fails us when trying to either acquire new skills or to get our current skills to the next level.
Until you have stood on a stage facing a bunch of elementary school kids and tried something that didn't really keep their attention very well, you are not an expert at addressing a room full of 7-year-olds.
Until you have played a Dixieland gig with no music and played the changes as they seemed to fly by, you are not expert at Dixieland music.
(Side note: Tom Holtz mentioned in a master class recently that every single person sucks on their first Dixie gig. Every one. The experts who are playing along with the new guy or gal expect them to not be very good, just as they weren't on their first gig!)
Until you launch a podcast network and record an interview that it turns out is basically unlistenable due to technical problems and you have to fall on your sword and ask them to do the interview all over again, you are not an expert at podcasting. (Thank you Rex Richardson!)
Think of someone who you consider an expert at something. I guarantee you they have sought out situations in life where they "lose", make mistakes, and fail at a number of things, every single day.
That is how they became experts in the first place.
"Interesting that the uniform of the orchestra is black and white just like a keyboard. And basically a person is auditioning to be a key on the orchestral keyboard."
-Norman Bolter (former 2nd Trombone of the Boston Symphony)
This is why it so imperative to know the excerpts you are playing backwards and forwards. The people who win auditions can play a recording of the entire orchestra in their heads. That includes a number of bars before their excerpt begins and several bars afterwards.
Few people on your committee (if any) will play your instrument. They will be hearing their "key on the orchestral keyboard" while you are playing. If what you are playing does not fit with the part they are hearing in their heads you will be sent home. It is that simple.
The above quote is from a short and very insightful post on the relationships of attacks and tone quality by Chicago Symphony Principal Trombonist Jay Friedman.
You can find the entire article on his website.
"Never practice. Always perform."
-Bud Herseth
Mr. Herseth of course practiced all the time. But from all of the stories I've heard, he even played the most rudimentary of exercises as if he were performing for a large audience.
The biggest difference between good players and great players is intensity in the practice room.
Photo by regan76, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
Ravinia, where Bud Herseth performed for millions of people over the course of his career with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
This quote is taken from a 1919 interview with violin great Jascha Heifetz where he touches on a wide range of very important topics including not practicing too much, developing technical mastery on your instrument, and programming while keeping the audience in mind.
There are about 20 quotes I could pull from the interview to highlight but here's another that I really liked:
“Violin Mastery? To me it means the ability to make the violin a perfectly controlled instrument guided by the skill and intelligence of the artist, to compel it to respond in movement to his every wish. The artist must always be superior to his instrument, it must be his servant, one that he can do with what he will."
You can find the entire interview here.
"No one cares how hard you've worked. It's not an effort contest."
-Seth Godin
The music business, as with just about every single business in the world today, is a results-based business. It doesn't matter how long you spent studying the score. It doesn't matter how many hours you spent in the practice room. It doesn't matter how hard you marketed the event.
All that matters is how well you can conduct the piece. All that matters is how well you can play the part. All that matters is how many tickets you sold.
It's not an effort contest.
"Anxiety is practicing failure in advance."
-Seth Godin
What a quote! Seth Godin is in my opinion the most insightful thought leader of our time with regards to a whole lot of subjects but this might be my favorite quote of his ever.
If you suffer from performance anxiety maybe you should sign up for something like this?
