Are you Practicing Dangerously?

Recently, I had the opportunity to perform Corelli’s La Folia for the first time in several decades. For those of you who haven’t yet completely succumbed to recorder nerdery, Corelli’s Folia is set of virtuosic variations on a specific chord progression, originally penned for violin but transcribed for recorder fairly quickly thereafter.

La Folia is a mainstay of baroque recorder repertoire –and consequently, if you grow up playing recorder, it’s a piece that you typically encounter at a fairly young age.

There are definitely advantages to being a young musician. Your processing speed is zippy. Your eyesight is excellent. You can sleep on deeply uncomfortable beds and pillows and wake up with no crick in your neck!

But there are disadvantages, too. I think I first tackled La Folia in high school. I returned to it in college, performing it for my Freshman or Sophomore jury.

As a young musician, I had enthusiasm, but I lacked knowledge about the science of practice. I didn’t know how to harness important principles of practice like relaxation, variability, and spaced repetition to improve my skills, and so when I encountered difficult passagework in La Folia, I did what many young or beginning musicians do: I hurled myself repeatedly at the problem.

Unfortunately, brute force isn’t the smartest practice technique. As I crashed into difficult sections again and again in attempt to subdue them, I *was* getting better at something: I was getting better at anticipatory tension. As I neared the trouble spots, my body and fingers would automatically tighten up, preparing for battle.

I know this because, after college, I mostly put La Folia aside. And when I came back to it several decades later, that anticipatory tension was still there. When I approached particular passages, my body and fingers would tighten up in a way I hadn’t experienced in quite some time.

Practice is incredibly powerful. And this is great! Practice can, over time, help you tackle enormously complex tasks with grace and ease. But it’s also dangerous: If you accidentally practice things like mistakes and tension, you get better at those, too.

After many decades of daily recorder practice , Corelli’s Folia, while still a challenging piece, is no longer the mountainous undertaking it was for me when I was 18. I would hazard a guess that, if I had been coming to the piece for the first time, fresh, at the age that I am now and with the skills I have now, it would not have taken me all that long to work it up.

But I wasn’t coming to fresh. I was coming to it with tension and mistakes baked in. As a result, it took me far, far longer to untangle and master those passages I had practiced badly than it would have if I’d never practiced the piece in the first place.

I am forever telling me students to make sure they prioritize ease and relaxation in the initial learning stages of a piece. But it’s been a while since I’ve felt that lesson so viscerally.

Practice is your super power. Use it wisely!

Want to learn more about how to harness the power of practice? My small group Powerful Practice short course starts April 29!