There’s a noticeable trend I find not only in the lives of my students, but in my own, as well — practicing music isn’t as easy as it used to be.
Finding the time to devote to practice is getting more difficult because of the deluge of distractions in our lives today. And oddly enough, I find the greatest distraction is often the technology we voluntarily bring into our lives.
Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m no Luddite. I use technology every day, and certainly the range of tasks I can perform with ease now compared to days long gone is impressive. We have all become better at multitasking, doing many things simultaneously, with greater efficiency and quality of output.
But with the proliferation of multitasking comes a corresponding deficit — a degradation in the ability (or even the inclination) to turn off the tech and focus repeatedly and single-mindedly on one thing for a protracted length of time.
Which precisely defines good music practice.
As we embrace so-called labor-saving technologies (which we are told will simplify our lives), our lives actually become ever more complicated, and the time it takes us to perform mundane tasks often shortens not one bit… in fact, performing basic tasks today may even take us longer than it did before we embraced the tech.
For example, I can sit down with a blank sheet of score paper, listen to a song being played, hear and understand the chord changes, and by the end of the tune I will have scratched out a fairly legible chord chart (with a pencil, of course, because mistakes and subsequent revisions will happen).
I have tried doing that with Onsong, a popular, well-designed music annotation app, and fail to get past the first verse before I have to stop the tune and rewind for another pass.
Now, the visual quality of the completed Onsong output is vastly superior to my pencilled chart, is easily printed, replicated and shared, etc… but in the end is no more accurate, with probably fourfold the time invested in producing it.
I’m by no means advocating for a general rejection of technology — in most cases that would be (with 5G being but one notable exception), foolish.
However, the busy and distracted lives we create for ourselves, no matter our age, makes the simple focusing of our undivided attention on solitary music practice increasingly difficult, in that it’s a somewhat disruptive reversal of how our techie minds have come to function.
It’s always taken a good degree of self-discipline to engage in serious music practice, but it was easier back when practicing was the most exciting and mentally addicting activity we could pursue. It must be acknowledged that technology now strongly competes to scratch our mental and creative itches, while we passively enjoy the flashing lights and feeling of mastery we get from our devices.
The shifting of our attention away from the instant gratification of devices and back towards the tough slog of personal mastery over a recalcitrant musical instrument does not come to us easily. And so:
None of us will ever again find time to practice!
Our delightful devices and busy lives will not allow it.
If we are to grow as musicians, we must MAKE time to
turn off the tech and engage with our instruments, every day.
