Education music: music learning practice riyaaz
by Warren
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Two Techniques for Regulating Your Practice
More from the Brian O’Neill Interview. This post has the two of us discussing two techniques for controlling the use of practice time to maximize ROI.
The Technique of a Hundred Beans
WS: Here is a very good technique that my teacher showed me for helping to regulate one’s practice: Get two bowls, or cups, and, from the supermarket buy a bag of kidney beans or garbanzo beans or something. Garbanzos are good for this. Count out a hundred of them. Put them in one bowl. Transfer one bean from the source bowl to the target bowl after each repetition of the line.
Later, I introduced a refinement. You see, you take one lick and you repeat it exactly a hundred times. My refinement was that sometimes in those bags of garbanzo beans you get one that’s misshapen or miscolored or something. I put that one in there, and whenever I got that one, I improvised for the same length of time. So at some point, I’d get a little vacation, and it was always a pleasant surprise.
BTO: What’s the unit of time per garbanzo bean?
WS: It was one lick, whatever the lick was — you know, typically not more than a minute. A hundred minutes is a long time!
BTO: Oh, each repetition?
WS: Yeah, each repetition. Finish a repetition, transfer a bean — This is the way to really regulate repetition.
If you don’t repeat it, then you wind up thinking that you know it, but not really having it there when you need it. It’s gotta be like tying your shoes, you know? It has to be completely fixed in muscle memory.
Index Cards
One way of handling the question of “what should I practice today?” is to get some index cards. On each card you jot down the nature of a particular practice, along with a stipulated length of time — however long that particular practice is going to last.
“Expanding & contracting, going up six notes and going down, and then doing that from the tonic, third and fifth of the natural minor scale.” 10 minutes
“Four-note paltas in Raga Kafi, from Mandra Pa to Tar Ma.” 20 minutes.
“Major 7, Dom 7, Minor 7 and Min7 b5 arpeggios in all twelve keys, through the cycle of fifths.” 25 minutes.
“Sightreading from Captain O’Neill’s book of fiddle tunes.”10 minutes.
“This specific piece of complex bol-bant in ‘Piyu pal na laagi mori ankhiyaa’ (Raga Gaud Sarang).”15 minutes.
“Fast scales in 16th note triplets across a two octave range, sung & played on guitar. 20 minutes. Starting at metronome thus-and-such, going up to at least metronome thus-and-such.”
And, so, every time that you invent a new practice, you note down what it is. Then, after a little while, you wind up with a batch of cards; you have, perhaps, 15 or 20 cards.
Then, after you’ve done your basic warm-ups, you shuffle the cards, and whatever comes up, you do that. And then your practice for the day is however many cards you can fit in the unit of time that you have allotted to practice. And then, here’s the nice part: the next day, you don’t just start where you left off — you shuffle the cards again.
Which means that some of the time you wind up doing the same practice three days in a row. But over all, over the space of, say, two weeks, you wind up meeting everything in there, and experiencing it as a sort of total repertoire of stuff to do. Then you may observe, in the course of those practices, “Huh, it really seems like in this part of this thing [= practice, card], I’m really not making it.” Then you design a lick that embodies that particular [problematic] thing, and that’s when you do the technique-building, metronome-incrementing practice (described in “One Lick for Two Hours.” Then you go back to that same practice [on the index card] next week or something, and you’ll ace it!
environment Politics: Male models Scott Brown Senate
by Warren
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Month 2, Day 6: The New (AAAAGH!!!) Senator from Massachusetts
Well, I may not have voted for him, but I’m sure as hell one of his constituents, and he’s sure as hell going to be hearing from me. This one goes directly to Scott Brown, but I’m cc’ing John Kerry.
Notice that I used two paragraphs’ worth of material from the letter I sent Hillary Clinton, back on January 13. I’m an environmentalist; I recycle whenever possible.
Dear Senator Brown,
Congratulations on your recent electoral triumph. I hope that you take the responsibilities of your office seriously, and recognize that while you may espouse a “conservative” political philosophy, that does not change the fact that you’re a senator representing one of the most liberal states in the country.
I’ve heard that you refer to yourself as a “Scott Brown Republican,” and that you’ve told the Senate Republican leadership that they should not count on you for a lockstep vote on every issue. Good for you. A lot of your constituents are in the “liberal/progressive” category, and you have a responsibility to them as well as to the people who voted for you.
Here’s a good way to start. Do some genuine research on the issue of global climate change. Contrary to what you may have heard on Sean Hannity’s program, global climate change is real; it’s a real threat, and the evidence is overwhelming that it has been caused by human activity. The fact that it’s snowing heavily in Washington, DC does not mean that the Earth isn’t heating up.
I understand that as a Republican and a conservative, you are interested in maintaining a healthy business sector, and consider it to be key to the continued growth of America’s economy. Oddly, as a liberal progressive, I believe the exact same thing. We differ, I suspect, in that I am interested in the long-term health of our economy (say, over the next two centuries) while you are more focused on the short term (businesses tend to measure success by the financial quarter, a three-month period).
If the worst-case scenarios of climate scientists come to pass, the Earth will no longer be able to support human life, which would surely be disadvantageous for the American business sector. I know, I know. They’re “worst-case” scenarios. But I ask you to consider two factors. First, the fact that when climatologists’ predictions have proven wrong, it’s almost always because they were too optimistic; every credible report on the state of the world’s climate comes out on the “worse than expected” side of the slate. Second, even if the Venusian “worst-case” scenarios don’t come true, the “almost-as-bad” scenarios are almost as bad for our economy and our business sector.
Projections of the sociopolitical effects of climate change include severe disturbances to farming economies caused by erratic weather, increased risk of near-apocalyptic fires in forested areas affected by severe heat, “water wars” triggered by drought and the elimination of glacial melt as a source for important rivers and aquifers, and, of course, the inevitability of millions of climate refugees, many in the world’s poorest nations. Definitely bad for business.
Add to this the increasing likelihood that oceanic acidification will profoundly affect the food chain of much of earth’s life, and the terrifying prospect of gigatons of arctic methane being released into our atmosphere and bringing a greenhouse effect of unimaginable magnitude, and the possibility of a planetary enactment of a Biblical apocalypse becomes disturbingly likely. While some Dominionists may view this as desirable, hoping for the Rapture is not a valid environmental policy.
So, Senator Brown, I hope that you can do some of your own research on this matter, and make a decision to vote rationally — in favor of strong and robust energy and climate-change legislation when it comes to the floor of the Senate. To fail to act in this matter is to leave our grandchildren a horrifying legacy: a planet burning and a population choking on its own waste.
Please, Senator Brown. Do the right thing, not the politically convenient thing.
Thank you,
Warren Senders