28 Things I learned in Grad School

The Classical Guitar Blog represents my past two years in grad school pretty well. I started it during my first semester. As I learned things or had thoughts about music, they made it onto the blog. Here’s some of the stuff that stands out to me as the most valuable.

On Business

• If every musician spent 30 minutes each day developing relationships and networking there would be many more successful musicians.
• Reputation and developing your brand is more valuable than any amount of money.
• If performing is part of your brand, a performance degree will do nothing to help you get there. Seek out concerts (see the first item).

I gave a talk about some of the business stuff here

On Teaching

• The longer I teach the less interested I become in teaching styles other than classical.
• Recitals for students are extremely valuable–nothing makes a student more excited than experiencing success in a performance situation.
• Students get very excited when you let them express creativity in music. It’s very easy to get a student composing from the first lessons.
• Beginning guitar technique has very little variation. It’s never boring to teach it, however; every student is different and needs different sorts of cues and explanations.
• It’s easy to teach even the youngest students to incorporate basic musical elements.

On Performing

• Living with a piece for a long time–performing it often–is the best way to overcome anxiety. Or at least get used to it.
• Performance anxiety doesn’t go away, but the feel of it becomes a sort of thrill.
• Talking about a piece before playing it is much more terrifying.
• Start strong and end strong. The stuff in the middle is nice too. I guess.

On Practicing

• Efficiency is king. If I can get the same amount done in less time, that leaves more time in the day for me to pursue other interests or network (see the first item).
• Part of efficiency is managing repetition. 7-10 perfect repetitions is fine. The problem is finding ways to play a passage perfectly! (see practice techniques).
• three hours per day is just about right.
• Slow/fast alternation is awesome.
• Never wait to develop an interpretation. Never wait to get the piece “in the fingers” before starting to make musical decisions.
• There’s no reason why a multi-movement piece has to be learned start to finish. Hit the hard stuff first.

On Music in General

• If you want to understand music analysis, take composition lessons from a good teacher. It changes the way you look at music–you’ll see connections that have previously gone unnoticed.
• A good repertoire selection will include challenging pieces that take months to work up and pieces that are easily prepared in a few practice sessions or weeks.
• It’s more fun to play pieces that no one else does.
• Form and motivic development interests me more than harmony.

Misc.

• Pool is a good game.
• I really enjoy learning things–even a lot of random stuff.
• The music binder is a good idea.
• Sometimes little things can add up to a big difference.

In the fall I begin a DMA at the University of North Texas, and I’m excited to keep posting as I learn more.