Let A-Rod Guide Your Conducting Practice

My beautiful, wonderful, talented, graphic designer wife just emailed me 2 great articles on deliberate practice. The first from the guys at Freakonomics on How A-Rod Got So Good and the second is from Global Maverick on How Ben Franklin Got so Good. Both articles are quick primers on what it takes to accomplish greatness.

My favorite discussion is from Global Maverick who quotes the book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. Colvin discusses Ben Franklin’s efforts to improve as a writer by working on his own perceived weaknesses which he identified as: Expressiveness, Vocabulary, and Organization.

I think these are directly transferable to musical practice and serve as fantastic guides to developing one’s conducting practice. And of course by practice, I mean deliberate practice. Which is what the fellas at Freaknomics were discussing.  So let’s discuss deliberate practice quickly. Mr. Dubner provides a good summation:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

Obviously, the best tool for a conductor to use for implementing these ideas is the video camera. I agree with those people who think we should be taping ourselves as much as possible. And, no, not just because we are egomaniacal narcissists who love to stare at ourselves. Just as audio recordings help train musicians to have better intonation and tone production, video can help conductors really develop their technique.

I think we should video tape ourselves not only during rehearsals and concerts, but also while we practice by ourselves. Patterns, gestures, actual scores, all of it.  Stand there in your living room looking like a doofus and imagine the ensemble around in the room, and conduct the music while a metronome is going. You can really start to see if you are expressing the music, using a variety of vocabulary, and you can watch to see if your gestures and ideas are organized to fit the music’s needs.

Dubner talks about A-Rod’s efforts to specifically target his practice. Mr. A-Rod didn’t just throw the ball around and knock the stuffing out of the ball everytime he was up at batting practice. (“Knocking the Stuffing out of the Ball” is my preferred method at the batting cages. But then mine is more for stress relief.)  No, A-Rod worked diligently at specific areas with specific goals.

This Times article by Tyler Kepner describes how Bobby Meacham, the Yankees’ new third-base coach, recalls seeing a young Alex Rodriguezapproach the game. At the time, Meacham was a minor league manager whose team was hosting A-Rod’s minor league team:

“I said, ‘This guy goes about his business not like he wants to get to the big leagues, but like he wants to be the best,’” Meacham said.

“He knows he’s going to be good, but he wants to be great. There was just a method to it.”

In fielding practice, Meacham remembered, Rodriguez would ask for grounders to his right and to his left, and he would ask for fielders at second for a double play and at first for throws across the diamond. In batting practice, he would focus on specific disciplines — grounders the other way, liners to the gaps, and so on.

“At 18 or 19 years old, he already had a plan,” Meacham said. “It was pretty awesome to watch.”

Working on specific areas of weakness and focusing on technique is absolutely necessary in order to improve.  He recognized that the success would come when he could hit and field better than everyone else.

So let’s get back to Mr. Franklin, his three areas of focus and how I think they relate to conducting practice: Expressiveness, Vocabulary, and Organization.

1. Expressiveness: I don’t think of this as one’s melodramatic emoting at an orchestra, rather I think of it as a guide for identifying how much you are able to express the musical idea?  Or even better, how able are you to communicate the musical idea? The crescendo for two bars? When watching the tape with the sound turned off, did your physical gestures reflect what was supposed to be happening in the music?

2. Vocabulary: How many gestures do you have available to make what you need to happen, happen? Do you always go back to a couple of moves to solve a similar rhythmic problem in Mozart and in Shostakovitch and in Adams? How expansive is your vocabulary?  Apparently, Ben Franklin would write an essay, then rewrite it in metered rhyme forcing himself to expand the vocabulary used in order to accomplish the task.  Once finished he would put it away for awhile then write the essay from verse into prose and then compare it to the original prose essay.

3. Organization: How we move, where we gesture, how large/small we gesture, should be in relationship to the organization of the piece.  We want to have a wide vocabulary of gestures available, but we don’t need to use every gesture every time, just as we don’t want to only use the same word.  Additionally, we need to gauge the dynamics of the work and how we affect those gestures.

Obviously, there is not any one way to approach this stuff.  But I remember when I was starting out, and now that I am teaching beginning students, what it was like to be told “Go practice,” and I have no idea what to do from there. So I would say, okay, cool here I go and then just start winging it.

Developing a sustained and deliberate practice is vital to future success. Thank you to my wife for sending me these articles that show how Ben Franklin’s efforts more than 200 years ago still are affecting the research and practice of peak performers and that A-Rod can be an inspiration for getting back to basics in our conducting practice.