Charles Stier > Books > On Performance > Practice
 

The goal of practice is to achieve consistent and beautiful results in performance.

To practice is to find the technical solution to support and create every musical element or gesture.

To practice is to improve, maintain, repair or prepare.

To practice is to replace indulgence with discipline; ignorance with awareness.

Practice so that every element of the music has a lifetime--a beginning, growth,
maturity, decay and ending appropriate to its position and function in the form.
This will give create unity, a sense of completeness and reveal the natural pacing and proportions of the music.

Know the small to be able to create the large; understand the large to be a balanced unity of the small. This is of primary importance, for from this principle flows every success.

Practice until every principle is realized from within, not imposed from without.

You must practice with your mind so that you may play from your heart.

When you practice, practice. When you rest, rest. Above all, no guilt.

You must practice in order to be able to perform, but you must perform in order to know how and what to practice. The way others will measure your skills in the concert hall will be decided by your meticulous attention to detail in the practice room. This requires a phenomenal amount of effort.

Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Be thorough. Your preparation for performance must be flawless, for the path to perfection in performance is only lit by perfection of preparation. You must be so
well trained that you are automatically immaculate in performance--when you will be
nervous and excited.

As with the concept of tone, you must also know what you want the music to sound like
before you play it.

To practice is to learn to place your spirit in the future so that you may reveal the music in the present. The feeling is one of being invisibly pulled forward through time.

Practice to achieve the internal balance of the confidence explicit in the act of performing with the humility implicit in knowing that there is always more to learn.

Practice is the accumulation of layers of understanding. The process of learning and
improvement is like the waves on the incoming tide. There will be periods of stagnation and ebb, but ultimately the progress will be forward. Have faith.

To practice is to develop the awareness that allows you to seek out then balance the variables of the music. To practice is to develop the flexibility that allows you to broaden the scope of these variables.

To practice is to develop the consistency that allows you to present any flexible
combination of variables in performance.

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