Practicing without your instrument? The benefits of mental practice
“Some pieces need space and silence to be fully deciphered” – Stephen Hough
Franz Liszt’s manuscript of Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178, 1853
If you’re new to the idea, practicing away from your instrument might seem like a contradiction. How are you supposed to improve your violin playing without playing the violin? Or maybe you have heard of it, but only under dubious circumstances – “I’m on holiday without a piano for the week before my recital, but it’s okay because I’ll do loads of mental practice while I’m there…!” Perhaps you think the only practice that really counts towards your 5 hours a day are the hours spent beavering away in a stuffy basement practice room, but the reality is that many great performers past and present have spoken about the creativity of looking at scores on the train, or by singing quietly to oneself when no one else is at home.
TwoSetViolin made a great video on the topic, where Eddy attempts to learn the opening of Paginini’s 1st Violin Concerto without touching his instrument. Things go well for him until he reaches a monstrous passage of double thirds, and, after struggling for a while, he admits defeat and declares: “When there are no double stops, mental practice works. But if there are thirds, you might want to touch your instrument.” So, you heard it from TwoSetViolin themselves! Away from your instrument, just looking at the music and listening to it can help you get familiar with new pieces, and speed up the learning process. Additionally, at this stage you can also start to think about your game plan in tackling the piece – which bits need lots of work? How will you practice them?
Mental practice can even help with those double thirds that Eddy struggled with. Unfortunately, he’s right in that the hard work at your instrument is still necessary. But ultimately there is a mental component to every physical act. The concept of visualization, that of vividly imagining yourself doing a task, is widely used in sports – take, for instance, the story of James Nesmith, who visualized himself playing golf every day of his 7 year solitary confinement as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. As a result of all this mental practice, his golf playing did not deteriorate during this time. In fact, in his first game after release, he slashed twenty strokes off his previous best.
The parallels with music are obvious. In working on something technically demanding, once we’ve toiled enough in a practice room we then need to go away and do some psychological work to put ourselves at ease with the passage in question. “Imagine yourself tossing off tricky passages with aplomb,” writes Gerald Klickstein. After all, if you’re anxious about something going wrong, your muscles will be tight, reducing your chances of succeeding.
Turning away from matters of technique, another benefit of engaging with a piece away from an instrument is that it can help us gain a better sense of perspective. Often when we practice, we work at a piece in sections, trying to improve each at a time before stitching them all together. We then need mental practice to unify the work in our minds and to experience it as an organic whole, the same way we would have experienced it upon first listening.
So what can we do to achieve this sense of perspective? If you’re analytically inclined, try identifying any formal schemes that the piece you’re working on employs. Even a very general analysis can be useful; ask yourself where the main themes are, which sections are transitions, which are codas, etc. This kind of work can be especially useful for larger 19th and 20th century works, where, underneath a seemingly rhapsodic surface, classical structures are often subtly at play (Chopin’s Ballades are a good example).
And if you’re not analytically inclined, it can be very useful to spend time simply hearing the work internally, without playing it or listening to a recording. Personally, when I’m in the practice room I get easily anxious and obsess over the mechanical donkey work, in the process completely losing sight of matters of expression – what is the piece trying to say? What drew me to it in the first place? Often, to reconnect with these emotional aspects of the music, I’ll find somewhere quiet, get out my score and simply hear the piece unfolding in my mind (a cup of tea, while not essential, is extremely useful to have at hand).
How does this help? By setting aside matters of execution and technique, focusing purely on the music itself helps with consolidating your musical and artistic intentions – it’s like listening to your own ideal rendition of the piece. You must imagine the music in its fullest detail, with every nuance in timing and shape that you think the piece needs. You can then work to make them happen in your “actual” practice.
Additionally, engaging with the piece this way allows you to reconnect with the score. Especially for those with a good memory, it can be easy to overlook the printed music while playing and only consult it occasionally (sometimes I forget to even take the book out of my rucksack to begin with!). It’s important to check in with it once in a while though, and look closely at all the minute details. Some composers were painstaking in how they annotated their scores. Look for instance at these two lines from Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige – almost every note has some kind of symbol attached to it, not to mention the beautifully evocative words of prose description. It’s not enough to simply follow these instructions – Debussy is trying to tell you something deeper about the music with these annotations. Ask yourself why those markings are there, and what they really mean.
Claude Debussy, Des pas sur la neige, 1909
Ultimately, what practicing away from your instrument can give you is the space to reflect on the music and the work you’ve done on it. So much practice advice centers on making your practice as efficient and productive as possible – obviously this is extremely important, but don’t forget that we are artists and creatives at the end of the day. The pianist Leschetizky said that “the musician is like a painter, who frequently spends his time in looking at the work he has done, and in thinking what he will make of it, without touching the easel.” So, perhaps consider, at least once in a while, putting down your instrument and taking a step back from the music stand.