Practicing Practice ticing ing Prctcng aii PRACTicing pracTICING

As a child I was lucky to have teachers and parents who cared enough to notice my intellectual and personal strengths and weaknesses. I will never forget the short rhymed sentence written in beautiful calligraphy that each of us students received in third grade around Christmas time. Mine read: “Rebecca brings a poem each day and so the spelling words are here to stay”. At the time I was captured often by poetic inspiration while in class and would be asked to recite aloud my new composition. But my spelling was borderline. As the little verse indicates, the challenge for me was and has always been, moving beyond that fire of initial inspiration to the work of editing and refining, systematic and careful work that develops natural abilities to a higher level.

While my love for the stage and my precocious emotional depth made the cello an obvious expression for my creative talent, the fact that progressing on a musical instrument required all those skills and abilities that I lacked in my personality and work must have been the reason that I kept returning for more. The act of practicing shaped and defined my personality and my life, contributing a set of skills that I was not born with. While still sometimes a crucible for my impatience and wandering mind, if once I was martyred by my art, now I feel it stands at the center of my well being. The beautiful focused time slowly earned my love, with a million moments of total emptiness and peace, puzzles and miniscule details unwound and broken down then put together more whole than before. My thoughts slowly changed over time from primarily ones of frustration and overwhelm, to curiosity and gratitude for the endless journey of musicianship. Always in the center of my life has been a still core that holds all the loose ends of my world together. My hands moving over the instrument provide a point of reference, a center of the universe, a backdrop for all scenes, countries, mental and physical states of being, seasons and hours. As a teenager in a large and loud family, I could retreat to my room to discover Bach. In the dizzy aftershock of arriving in Bangkok after days of travel, I savored the feel of the humidity soaked steel strings under my hands. I have played with a fever, a migraine, after discovering my sister in law had breast cancer, after a fight with my husband, a ten mile hike, at a friends funeral, five weddings, for my dying grandfather and numerous babies.

This last year as a full time professor, I learned about short segments of efficient and spot practicing between lessons and meetings, often while exhausted, and with little mental energy. This was one point of reference that told me my life needed to change. Lately I have been discovering the other end of the spectrum; long hours of luxurious musical exploration between expeditions to go strawberry picking, or hiking to waterfalls plunging down verdant mountainsides. Ahhh, New England in the summer! Memorizing my music, each small phrase at a time, I find my ears are listening to details I never noticed before. I carve out a phrase numerous times, repeat a shift, discover a particularly luminous sound, and suddenly another hour has passed. I ambitiously told myself that I would work up to six hours of practicing in order to build up the mental and physical stamina needed to record my album, believing that this would be a tedious struggle to achieve, but I have begun to discover that after enough hours the mind stops wandering all over the map and begins to be totally fascinated by the task at hand. By hour five fifteen minutes passes in a moment. As I have found with regular exercise, the mind and body begin to crave what they are used to, and suddenly any less than 4-6 hours feels strange and unfulfilling.

It is hard to sense how much progress I am making. I am reaching the concrete daily and weekly goals set, but more importantly, I feel the music slipping deeper and deeper into my visceral experience, and it is becoming akin to walking a well-worn path through various landscapes, eyes closed, bare feet. Each day I remove more stones out of the way, cut back branches, shovel the snow. And each day there is a little less to tend to, though there are always those spider webs that reappear between branches. But still, it is hard to tell. I am too busy becoming acquainted with each and every inch of this landscape to really be bothered with the idea of progress.

On the other hand, I do have the daily visitation of a phantom microphone haunting my practice sessions. It helps me to remain honest in my intonation and sound. Next week this will be more than imagination when I pull out my little zoom recorder and get a birds eye view of my pieces. Meanwhile, I will keep moving down this meditative path we call practicing, with a capacity for patience and care that has taken me 20 years of practicing to develop.

About five years ago after a particularly grueling practice session of the Dvorak cello concerto, I found myself walking home through the streets of Boston, enviously imagining the beautiful unselfconscious voice of a songbird, a voice untrained by any external concept of beauty, yet glorious and perfect. As a teenager raised in a beautiful rural area, I turned often to nature for solace, and it was easy to recall the little warbles of joyous self expression, and the clear and simple calls from the tree tops at dawn. Comparing my musicianship to that of a songbird, I imagined how strange it would be if a bird were to practice and perfect as I did, if after each call she would analyze and reflect to herself “hmm, that last pitch was a little sharp, maybe more volume on the trill, perhaps I should phrase towards the lower notes.”

Realizing that a songbird is capable of virtuosity and nuance was the pivotal moment that allowed my deepest musical voice to began to emerge out from under the oppression of my dictatorial brain. My visceral and instinctual expressive nature became the teacher of my body and mind, giving a focus and direction to distract and occupy my thoughts so my soul could find some measure of expressive freedom.

Two days ago, camping on the northern Massachusetts coast near Plum Island, I snuggled up in my sleeping bag ready for a peaceful sleep. Moments after closing my eyes, I was engaged by a strange and magnificent sound; a beautiful bird with an incredibly elaborate and ever changing call. From high chirps, low warbles, to screeches and caws, this bird could do it all. I tried to track the different calls to see if there was a repetition or order, and to figure out what species it was, but I could not make sense of it. It seemed that the range was too large for one single bird. Late May being the height of bird migration on Plum Island, it is a time when avid bird watchers gather with their binoculars to spot migrating herons and nesting piping plovers and killdeer, and hundreds of other species. When I began to notice that the voice systemically repeated each call two to three times, then moved on to the next, I became convinced that some bird call specialist was reviewing the calls for the next day, and drilling the calls with the assistance of a recording. Yet why was it directly overhead? I drifted off to sleep, too tired to answer these questions.

I was awakened at five in the morning to an enormous chorus of birds from every direction, each singing their species specific song, and amongst all of them that versatile and especially loud soloist singing two to three repetition of every single song. Was this a bird after all? But what sort of strange bird? My brain searched for an explanation. I began to imagine this was some way of assisting migration and that the state government was piping the calls through some speaker system, probably attached to the large column of lights leading up to each bathroom. After listening for several minutes to the dozens of different bird calls one transforming into the next, I began to pick out a few familiar calls from specific birds such as the robin, crow and seagull. Then I noticed a car alarm, a cell phone ring, a backing up truck and a cat meow thrown in the mix. Despite the early hour, I found myself laughing out loud, amused and awed at what clearly was a very talented animal.

As I lay in the tent smiling and laughing, I had incredible gratitude for his presence and I felt a profound kinship with that little mockingbird nested in the tree above. I also thought I could learn from his calling out with unabashed virtuosity, with a repertoire and vocal prowess developed over years of being located in one of the most bird-rich areas in the country. I saw a connection between his collage of calls and my own daily routine of virtuosic imitation, my current Folkfire CD project being a mosaic of short “bird calls” from cultures around the world. I even felt a resonance with the mockingbirds lack of belonging to any one group of calls, yet belonging in a way to all of them. As the hub in the center of the wheel of chirps and warbles, his voice unified and centered the cacophony of sound. While looking like a great showman, in truth, the mockingbird gives up the comfort of anonymity and group belonging and is at once both totally alone and individuated while at the same time a great unifying, selfless voice.

On that pivotal evening five years ago the memory of a songbird helped me rediscover my authentic voice. This week the mockingbird taught me to understand what it means to have this voice.