A little bit of meta about music and writing

[kate]

I've been thinking about music, lately. About how I got to where I am, and if I can take what I learned while mastering my instrument and apply it to other things (signs point to yes).

I started playing piano when I was five. I joined band when I was eleven, starting on flute and moving to clarinet pretty easily – and then picking up saxophone for the hell of it. It was easy for an intelligent kid. I find it hilarious that I got out of a ton of General Ed requirements in college because music majors didn't have to have them. Who needs math if you're playing an instrument? Besides, musicians, they're not too bright, right? Au contraire. The best musicians are extremely bright, and have to be, to be able to do what they do.

By the time I hit high school, I'd already realized that I could never be a professional musician – because I didn't feel anything when I played. That wasn't quite true, but I was too young to understand how my teachers had misled me. You see, what I felt was joy. Just pure and simple love of playing my instrument. But I didn't feel sad when I played a sad song, or happy when I played a happy song, so clearly I was defective. I gave up on the idea of playing professionally and, even though I was well on my way to mastery by the time I hit high school, having practiced thousands of hours already, I decided to teach.

It wasn't a tough decision, as I love to teach, but it stung. I was so much better than everyone I knew (small pond, middle Wisconsin), but I could never play professionally because I didn't have the heart.

When I went to Interlochen, an arts camp for the elite, I was at the bottom of the totem pole. So, not only was I not an artist, I was a sucky technician, too. Since I already knew I wasn't going to be a performer, the artist part wasn't a shocker, but the technician part pissed me off. So, I practiced. And what I learned that summer was that if I practiced hard, I could rise in the ranks. I went from second last clarinetist in the whole camp to middle rank of the top band in eight weeks. Not too shabby for a sixteen-year-old who was never going to be a performer.

I was well on my way to becoming a band director when my dad's heart failed, and we found out he needed a heart transplant. It was awful – I was only a year and a half away from college graduation, but there was no way I could be so far from home. I moved back and transferred to the local college, which had a music program. Not a good music program, mind you, but one that conferred Music Ed degrees, so ostensibly one that would suit my needs.

It was another small pond, after I had been out there in an honest to god competitive environment. I was leaps and bounds ahead of everyone around me, and even as I taught them how to be better (the clarinet teacher was a joke), I immediately recognized I couldn't handle more than a semester of that place. Instead, I jumped ship and transferred to a music conservatory almost as close to home. Not somewhere I ever thought I could get in, much less get a scholarship to, but I did. I got a full ride (thanks to my grades, not my performance ability), and that was when things really started to change for me.

My teacher, Fan Lei, had been a child prodigy in China – as a matter of fact, he was only a couple of years older than me when I got there (and only had a master's degree). He was auditioning for the job at the same time I was auditioning to matriculate. He played a short recital and I was astounded to hear someone play so well that wasn't either a huge recording name or in an orchestra somewhere.

He didn't take it easy on us, either. We started over, all our technique suspect. Being smart and diligent came in handy – I practiced every day (only an hour or two, but it was enough), and I 'got' it. I was the one he'd single out to play for the entire clarinet studio. We had a rocky time, but overall, I got better and better, and he began to try to teach me the illusive musicality (artistry for musicians, don't you know). That was tougher. I didn't always get what he meant; I couldn't just practice and eventually get it. That was where intelligence came in. I started to listen to professional recordings, and there were certain things that every clarinetist did. They slowed down at the end of pivotal phrases, they breathed in particular places, they tongued staccato here, legato there. They played with tempo in a particular way.

Once I realized this, that musicianship was really just another set of rules (albeit a far-ranging and incredibly complex set of rules that could sometimes be broken and really depended on your own personal likes and dislikes), I could now perform. I still felt like I wasn't a musician – I was performing music, but I wasn't living it, imbuing it with my soul – but nobody knew that. Not even my teacher. Not even my audience. No one but me.

By the end of conservatory, I was practicing four hours a day, and pretty confident that I could perform anything at all. I still felt like a fraud, though, and even now, I can talk technique with other musicians, but as soon as they talk about musicality, I feel like I'm faking it. I don't know why; I do feel things in music now where I used to feel nothing. I've felt sad or overwhelmed or whimsical when I've performed (and much more often as a listener or audience member), and I know that is the kind of musician I always wanted to be, but it doesn't feel like enough. I think this is why I never continued with music. Even with everything I can do, I feel like I'm faking it.

When a wise friend told me that writing is a craft, everything started to fall into place. I realized that music is a craft too, as much as we think it's some mystical thing that's above and beyond our ken. Music can be taught. I've learned it, I've taught it, I've seen students of mine perform music so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. All it takes is practice. The more you practice, the more all those things you do become second nature, they become part of who you are as a musician, they become so ingrained you don't even realize they're something you did for countless hours in a small room by yourself before the whole world was watching.

And so yes, music is an art, but one based on mastery of a craft. You can't create art until you've put the time in and learned every facet of the craft (and if someone had put it to me that way when I was a kid, I would probably be playing duets with Richard Stoltzman right now).

Writing, I'm finding, is the same. I have moments of transcendence, moments when I feel like something above and beyond is going on – but that's only happened since I mastered some of the basics of the craft.

And now, knowing what I do about the craft of music, I want to apply it to writing. It seems to me if I put some concentrated time into practicing the craft of writing, I should be able to master it. I don't know that I'll ever be able to create art, but I want to give it my best shot, by mastering the craft.

Practice. It's one of those things that's inescapable as a musician. Kids rarely get it, though I've managed to convince one or two with a really good lesson, and adults are hit or miss. Once I started practicing regularly – and by that I mean every day, at least an hour – I saw improvement. And not only did I see marked improvement in the day that I practiced (the difference between the beginning and end of a four hour session was remarkable), I could tell that I was building on it the next day. If I put in the time, even if I was tired, or uninspired, or unhappy, I would get better. There's nothing like improvement to make you just do it.

Music practice involves a few different steps for me. The first two hours are spent on technique. Long tones (to increase breath and get you to listen to yourself), scales and tonguing exercises (to build technique and facility), and études, (to master a specific technique, and be able to perform it within a piece, with musicality, instead of by rote). The next two hours are spent on repertoire. Learning the cornerstones of the repertoire and finding ways to interpret them to make them mine.

This is where I get stuck. I'm not actually planning on writing four hours a day (who has the time?) but I would like to get in an hour or two, and I'd like to make it pay off. Part of that will be the discipline to just do it, which has always been harder for me with writing than with music, probably because wrapped up in my writing instrument is a handy-dandy time-wasting thing known as the internets.

So, long tones. They're a way to see where you are, see if everything's working, and make sure you sound like you want to sound. I'm thinking maybe non-fiction essays. Or maybe just timed writing, like 15_minute_ficlets? They're really just a warm-up to make sure everything is working like it should.

Scales and tonguing are the meat and potatoes of music. They're basis of all classical technique (and, if you do some of the studies I do, more modern technique as well). This is really tough to translate to writing practice. There's so much that goes into good writing. Even just the nuts and bolts are huge: dialogue, description, sentence/paragraph construction, word choice, metaphor… I'm sure I'm forgetting some. I can come up with exercises for each of those, probably, but if practice is an everyday thing, I think I'm well over an hour before I even hit the third one of these. Maybe I'll have to come up with exercises for all of these and do a couple each day, alternating.

Pacing, characterization, tone, plotting, scene turning, packing an emotional punch… those are definitely études. I used to work on two études a week, but I think I can pick two of those and work them into a single story - one I write and perfect each week.

And repertoire. That's the big stuff. That's the easy part; I've got plenty of big stories, fanfic and otherwise, to work on. The only question is if I do a little of each or just work on one until it's finished.

It seems like a lot more than an hour. It seems like that'd be three or four hours. *frowns* Well, maybe I'll start and then tweak as I go. Any thoughts or suggestions? Anyone want to join me? Practice (like exercise) seems to be easier for me when I've got someone else there suffering with me cheering me on.