Yesterday, I participated with an adult classical guitar ensemble in a festival here in Austin. It is called "Guitars Galore," and featured performances by each of 9 ensembles, along with a guest speaker and a finale performance by about 50 of us on two pieces that we learned together. It was great fun, and our group performed pretty well, so that was a relief. The big finale performance went well, too, so the entire day was pretty satisfying, in a musical sense.
The big deal to me, however, was how I was affected by the guest speaker's presentation. His name is Glenn Kurtz, and he's written a book entitled "Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music." I picked up a copy of the book, but I haven't read it yet. That's not the most important thing in this story, however. Dr. Kurtz (he's a Professor of Comparative Literature) was a talented classical guitarist as a young man, and graduated from the New England Conservatory intending to pursue his dream of being a concert guitarist. When he realized that his talents weren't sufficient to achieve the lofty goals he had set for himself as a younger man, he grew disillusioned and quit the guitar and music entirely for some 10 years. After receiving his Masters and PhD in Literature, he eventually returned to the guitar to see if he could enjoy it and his relationship with music and the guitar on a totally different level than he had in his younger days. He discusses these conflicts in his book, as well as what the notion of "practice" means.
What I took from that presentation was that I've coasted along for quite a while as a guitarist on some basic level of ability, a decent musical ear, and the remnants of technique that I learned in about 4 years of guitar lessons that I took as an adult. I have never really practiced in any organized or regular fashion, and I certainly haven't done any musical "pushups" in that time. Those would be things like scales, arpeggio studies, and other didactic pieces. I know that they would help me along my musical journey, but have shunned them.
So, I've decided to set out and see if regular practice will help improve my musical lot in life. Today was Day One. What's my plan?
I established my goal as a minimum of 30 minutes of guitar practice per day. That's not so much. If I last longer on any given day, that's great. I might play either classical or steel string guitar, but most days, I anticipate this being a classical music endeavour.
I've picked out a bunch of classical guitar pieces to learn, or re-learn in some cases, in order to make my musical brain and muscles work in a focused way. The pieces are ones that I anticipate I'll be done with in a week, some in 2 weeks, or a month, or in some cases, 3 months (a couple of Bach pieces from his Cello Suites). I've also gotten out some of the collection of technique books and studies that I've bought in the past, and I plan to start each practice day with some of the nuts and bolts work that I should have been doing all along.
As for steel string guitar, I will mostly work with a pick, to get my chops up when I am not fingerpicking on that sort of instrument. Scales again, as well as some other patterns. I will improve on fingerpicking through the classical work, so I won't repeat too much of that outside of classical.
I will try to set goals for each practice session, in order to create some structure for myself. Whether I achieve any or all of my goals for a given day isn't as important as the focused attempt to do so. If I don't "block out chord changes for measures 30-45 of Carcassi number ##," I'll just put it on the goal list for the next day.
As always, I have an additional side project to learn the lyrics and chords to various popular songs so that if called upon at a party, I can actually play something. It's awfully embarrassing when you can only remember the intro and one verse and chorus of a song and have to mumble through the rest of it or just quit. So, we'll see how that goes as well.
I'll try and keep all of those various projects updated here.
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