I’m a big believer in finding ways to engage with music outside of your instrument. Obviously, we should all spend time on our instrument and get better at playing it, but developing an understanding of music as a whole can only help us become better musicians. A well-rounded approach to musicianship can help us color our expression and avoid injury and burnout.
In my case, I got injured my sophomore year of college and had to find ways to practice away from my instrument, since I could only tolerate 5 minutes of practice at a time in those days. That means I did a lot of learning without my instrument: developing body awareness, score study, reading, listening, analyzing, thinking through how I’d teach a skill I was working on, ear training.
Though it really felt like a setback at the time, my injury gave me time to step back and assess the gaps in my knowledge of music, my playing and my conditioning.
The good news? You don’t need an injury to do this!! I encourage you to not be afraid to spend some of your practice time learning something new related to music. But, if you are experiencing pain or fatigue, or you’re in a season of stepping back from your instrument, take this opportunity to develop your curiosity and round out your musicianship. Let’s cover a few possible topics.
Disclaimer: this list is NOT exhaustive and we could all spend lifetimes delving into these topics. I’m not saying we all need to become experts in these areas of study. But if we limit our practice of becoming better musicians to playing our primary instrument, we are doing ourselves a huge disservice. Let’s be curious humans and open up how we learn music!
Score study
Score study is the technique we all think about for practicing away from our instrument, and it pairs really well with mental practice too! Not only can we learn our own parts in a piece better with score studying, we can also learn the other musicians’ parts in the piece. Sitting down with a score and analyzing its harmonic structure can be tedious, but knowing the decisions the composer made regarding the trajectory of their music really deepens our understanding of the piece.
Score study doesn’t have to only apply to pieces we are working on, too. Comparing a composer’s earlier work to their later work or different pieces in the same style or period can be very helpful in deepening our understanding of that composer’s or style’s soundscape. It can also really help improve our musicianship.
Ethnomusicology
When I was first diagnosed with my injury, I had the incredible blessing of being enrolled in a world music class. Not only did that ethnomusicology class keep me sane, but it literally opened up the world of music to me. We toured South and West Africa and learned those countries’ rhythms, dances and songs; we learned about the origins of the marimba in Zimbabwe; danced Brazilian samba; sang and played mariachi; discovered the joik of Sami culture in Norway and the sean nos of Ireland.
My favorite part of the class was the last few weeks, where my classmates and I all found a country to learn about and present on. I fell in love with Georgian culture and polyphonic folk singing (I mean, these people have really intense sword dances and teach their kids to sing in 4-part harmony before they hit middle school. What’s not to love?)! That world music class gave me the resources and the interest to keep exploring different cultures’ traditions, and made me a much humbler and curious musician.
If you’re interested in ethnomusicology but not sure where to start, I encourage you to find a country you’re interested in learning more about and start going down rabbit holes! Here are some resources that were helpful for my classmates and I:
o Wikipedia always has some wonderful information on it, but I found that checking out its references sections for source material was its most useful application other than an introduction to the topic you’re researching (which has a lot of value in and of itself!)
o Smithsonian Folkways is a world music database with a ton of recordings, pedagogy materials, video content and websites to check out
o Grove Music has scholarly articles on music to access
o The great and mighty YouTube
o Smithsonian Global Sound. A database of recordings. You’re welcome.
Musicianship
If you are a music student, a teacher has definitely told you that you needed to work on a basic musicianship skill. For me, those skills are rhythm and theory. Spending time deepening my skill and knowledge of theory and executing rhythms by singing, clapping and listening to lectures and educational content on YouTube helped my musicianship immensely. Learning other styles of music can also really help with your general musicianship skills as well!
Background Research
I began working on my senior recital pieces while I was still recovery from my injury. I had a lot of anxiety about whether I would be able to perform the program I chose with my health concerns, but I started early and took a holistic approach to learning. Specifically, I did a lot of research on the composers I chose and got to know their lives and the political, social and innovative phenomena that influenced them. This led me to a deep understanding of their composition style and their voice, which served me well in performance.
My teachers also encouraged me to listen to and read about other composers in the same time period to get an idea of the sounds particular to that time period and style. It was a lot of fun and really brought out my inner musicologist!!
Getting to Know the Body
I touched on the discipline of body mapping in my last post, which is a discipline unto itself and worth exploring in a lot of depth. In this post, I want to highlight the benefit I derived from studying anatomy and kinesiology, especially as they relate to body awareness and movement. Even though it is an art form, playing music is also a movement discipline.
Because our bodies are so heavily involved in performing, we have a responsibility to ourselves to learn how our bodies are set up to function well and the risks associated with playing music. Gaining a basic understanding of how our musculoskeletal system and interacted with physics and the other systems in the body served me really well in recovering from my injuries and made me a much better teacher. Learning a little about psychology and stress management has been incredibly helpful in the mental side of performing, practicing and being a musician as well.
Some resources that I’ve found helpful:
o What Every Musician Needs to Know About the Body and What Every Violinist Needs to Know About the Body by Barbra Conable
o The PreHab Guys (YouTube channel with wonderful resources on injury prevention, they provide short anatomical explanations for how their exercises work and it’s fantastic)
o The Noted Anatomist (YouTube, quick anatomy learning videos with the musculoskeletal and nervous systems)
o Angela McCuiston, founder of Music Strong, has written a fantastic guide to designing your own workout programs and identifying imbalances in your body.
Teaching
As musicians, most of us at some point in our careers will teach others about what we do. Whether teaching is a big part of your life as a musician or not, teaching others a skill is not only itself an invaluable skill to develop, but it also solidifies your understanding of a concept. While finding material for my students, I found that my understanding of musical concepts deepened.
Teaching also held up a mirror to my own playing and helped me see the areas where I needed a more solid foundation. Even if you don’t teach any students, getting your hands on teaching materials, books and podcasts can be a wonderful way to test your knowledge of your instrument and grow in your musicianship. For violinists, I would recommend Simon Fischer’s Basics.
There is SO much to learn in the world of music that it can be really overwhelming. Here’s an idea to help avoid overwhelm: take one thing that sounds interesting and learn about it for a week. After that, you can decide whether you want to keep learning about it for the following week or move on to a different thing. I would definitely encourage taking notes on the things that were most interesting or meaningful to you so you can refer back to them later (I promise, you will – after all, that’s how this blog got started!).
I’d love to know about something really meaningful that you recently learned, or if there is something that you’d like to learn more about in music. Let me know on social media or in my contact form – I would love to connect.
Until next time, happy practicing!
To see the other posts in this series, see below: