Making Time For Practice

When I started my first job out of graduate school, I soon realized that entire days would go by without my doing any serious practicing. There were meetings, a full year’s worth of choral and liturgical music to plan and organize, desk work and phone calls, etc. etc. Somehow my time alone on the bench got eaten away by one thing or another. Though I loved my work as a church musician, it hit me one day that I was ignoring my other work, that of a serious concert artist – and that it was happening because I simply wasn’t relegating the time for it. Then the answer was clear: I had to schedule my practice time, just like any meeting, rehearsal, or other work activity. It was simple then to inform the staff (including Gary of the mighty Hoover!) of my practice schedule, and to request no phone calls, major work in the church, etc.

It was a change that enabled my concert career to really take off. Without a couple of months I was back to playing very difficult repertoire at a high level, and decided to enter the Saint Albans competition. I began to tell people I had a “rehearsal” even if it was only the console and me, in order to protect my time. (How often had a conversation gone like this: “What are you doing this afternoon?” “Well, I’ve got to practice!” “Oh come on, you’re so good, you don’t need to practice any more.”, or perhaps, “Oh, you don’t want to practice... that’s boring.”)

[By the way, it’s been a long time since practice has felt boring – a subject for another time.]

A pianist friend of mine recently said, when you’re a singer, or a pianist, or an organist, whatever, you make time for practicing and for playing because that’s who you are. You have this higher power-given talent, and that is, in a sense, what you were created to do and to be. So you play, or you sing, or you make pottery, or whatever. It’s not really a choice. How to do that and manage the diapers and the house cleaning and the bill-paying is a whole other conversation – again, another time!

The real test of course is whether you’re happy not doing it. I found, many years ago, that I wasn’t. So........... it’s off to find the Advent and Christmas decorations from the storage closet, and then after a nice lunch, I get to practice.