On Practicing...and quitting

I just finished reading Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music by Glenn Kurtz. It's a memoir about a guy who has a dream to become an internationally renowned, world-touring classical guitarist. He goes to the New England Conservatory, graduates, and eventually quits the guitar, crushed that his dream of being at the top doesn't come true. Eventually, he goes on to pursue a Ph.D in literature at Stanford and ends up as a professor teaching lit to art students. And he also comes back to the guitar after 10 years of not playing and finally finds peace with it. Practicing eventually becomes more than a means to an end. It becomes a freeing form of self-expression that he does out of passion for the music itself rather than a pathway to greatness.

I was wary of the book at first- would this book make me want to quit, faced with the reality that there really is not room for another Segovia in 2008? But so much of it resonated with me and made me feel more positive about things. His honesty really struck me, as evidenced in this passage:

"Practicing can be a dream world in which you escape the reality of time. You believe that you have everything to do over again, that you have all the time in the world to achieve perfection. And every day we must practice. There is no other way to improve. Still, practicing, by itself, cheats you of half your life. Even if you are your only audience, music lives fully only in performance. Performance brings all the strands together, for a moment, joining the many conflicting voices with which music speaks- the joy, the frustration and anger, the loneliness, regret, and sudden elation. But unlike practice, every performance has an end. And without an end, music is just a fantasy. Now, returning to music, I hear how these tones equal my experience. Ringing and dying; my dream and its loss- together these define the boundaries of my ability, the high and the low, the edges I will always push against. Together they describe what music is for me, what "music" is, the full measure of my love."

I found this to be so true. The relationship between practicing and performing seems pretty straight-forward. Practicing is a means to an end, the end being the performance. Performance makes everything come out in the music that most of the time is not possible while you're practicing. Often times, an interpretation can spontaneously change in a performance because of the energy of that moment, the communication with the audience, and the intensity of the focus required to be fully involved in that piece of music. It can become more profound, beautiful, and revealing than you ever thought possible. Or, it can go completely awry and a memory slip can come up on something that you've played and known for years simply because you let self-doubt and fear control your playing for that moment. I've had both happen to me and I know that performing is not at all possible without many, many hours spent practicing. But is there a way to practice that conjures the essence of performing, so that half of my life is not spent preparing for something that ends right after the concert's over?

My personal struggle with practicing is about making something that I love into a form of work. Since music always came so naturally to me, I used to be able to fool my teachers into thinking I'd worked hard all week when really I practiced the day before my lesson and half an hour before my lesson. When I got to college, this was no longer possible and I knew that there came a point in my life where I had to start to work. Like, really work. I'm not a lazy person, really. I worked very hard at the things that I thought I was supposed to work hard at, like school. I was a great student in school. But I still find that I am a very bad music student. And now that I am a teacher too, I can see right through the ones who do as I used to do and practice right before their lesson day. And now that I am now my own teacher, there is no one to keep me accountable to what I do each day except for myself, which is a very difficult thing sometimes.

This is something that I have thought about for years and years, and there came a moment in a Juilliard practice room when I was so fed up with fingering and re-fingering a Bach suite that I cried tears of frustration over how futile, pointless, and irrelevant to the outside world this "work" seemed to be. After college, while my friends were working on Wall Street and getting jobs in the real world making money and moving money, I was stuck in this music bubble trying to figure out how guitar was relevant to everything else. Luckily, I had good friends at school who encouraged me and taught me that all of this "work", however tedious it could be at times, was delightful in the eyes of the Lord if my heart treated it as a form of worship. To know that God delights in my struggle to hone and cultivate this gift He's given me is what has made all the difference for me.

At times, I still desperately want a cubicle job where my expectations are clearly outlined and my deadlines are made for me. People always think I'm crazy for saying that. When I'm close to the edge (and this happened once last week) I start combing the job listings and wondering what else I could do with my life. It's mostly a pride issue, and I know that in the end it's also to prove to myself that I'm capable of other things, too. But as I've thought about it this week and as I gave a little "performance" to Paul while he was eating dinner last night, I feel more and more confirmed in my heart that I could never, ever quit. I will always play the guitar, always struggle with it, always teach it, and always love it just as I did when I was five years old. Maybe I'll never be Segovia, but I am going to take every opportunity that God gives me by storm as long as He gives me strength to.