The forest and the trees

Oh, the difference between what the audience hears in the concert hall and how it all starts out! A piece of music that comes across in the end as an elegant, fully coherent whole appears to us, in the early stages, as nothing but a giant heap of discrete and disparate bits: fingerings to figure out, rhythms to master, chords to voice, phrases to shape, harmonic progressions to understand, counterpoint to clarify, tempos to choose and achieve, jumps to measure and execute consistently… on and on and on. As we start, we may very often feel that we cannot see the forest for the trees.

It is natural enough that in the early stages with a new piece, the “forest,” in the sense of the flow and cohesion of the whole, is largely inaccessible to us. Even as we start out, though, it helps to remember that the forest is there, and that we are in fact already tiptoeing around in it. We just might not be able to see it (yet! Or hear it).

Remembering that the forest is already there doesn’t suggest anything in particular for us to do… but it means holding a view towards the piece in which we keep in mind that we’re slowly accessing something bigger. We remember that all of the myriad details we address in our practicing are there as components in a larger, cohesive whole. We are not just doing the drudgery of hauling bricks or stones, but also bearing in mind the vision of the cathedral we are slowly bringing into being. In this way, the right kind of view or attitude holds inspiration, motivation and energy for us as we work. Also, keeping this mindset predisposes us to notice relationships and patterns: this brick relates to that one in an interesting way! I wonder how they’ll fit when it’s all together…

(Pausing here with apologies for the mixed metaphor! The forest, which before it was a forest was a junk heap, has suddenly become a cathedral! But, as anyone who’s ever had a good piano teacher knows, different language lands differently. A new set of words may suddenly illuminate something we didn’t understand. And also… sometimes practicing is more like hauling bricks.)

Back to the forest and the trees! Most of us, it seems, are temperamentally inclined more towards one or the other. This shows up in our practicing in some fairly obvious ways. Some of us are conscientious, perfectionist types. We may be careful to the point of near-paralysis. We live in mortal fear of learning wrong notes; we compulsively stop to fix every little thing as we go. We are reluctant to push the tempo faster, even when we know the piece well. Our view is close in. We carefully notice and attend to each tree, one at a time, and any single troublesome limb can stop us in our tracks.

Others of us are impulsive, visionary, big-picture oriented. We are in it for the whole forest and cannot be bothered to stop to deal with any individual tree! (What was that I just flew past? I’ll come back for that later! Never mind when!) We boldly plow onwards; we do not fear mistakes. We choose tempos we cannot control, but control (we tell ourselves, if we think about it at all) is surely overrated! We have a generalized, fly-over view of the piece, sometimes from such an altitude that many layers of the music have no chance of being perceived.

Our two practicers (they are caricatures, of course, extremes—not any of us…?) step out onto the stage. The practicer oriented towards the trees plays the notes cleanly, but slowly—or does it just feel stodgy, although the tempo is fine? The playing is without rhythmic vitality, without energy, and without a sense of the larger formal architecture. The performance is timid at best, tedious at worst. It is tidy, correct and clean, but it is not beautiful.

The practicer oriented towards the forest is more exciting to listen to! -but alas, more exasperating also. This person grasps the spirit of the music, captures something important about its essence—but may in fact be barely able to play it. (As Veda said many years ago to one of my brilliant classmates, who shall remain nameless here: “That was very good, but you forgot to learn the piece!”) Certain errors that this fearless player glosses over so casually may stick badly in the listener’s craw. It is a sloppy, overconfident display that rankles every bit as much as the smallness of the previous performance. The whole thing is beautiful in its way, but a mess. What is a practicer to do?

Though either extreme may be difficult to work with, in fact each of our very different practicers holds a piece of the puzzle. It is an important dialectic: Yes, And! Clearly we need both perspectives. We need attention to detail, AND we need flow, movement, a through-line, relationships, cohesion, architecture. Knowing our own tendencies can help us understand what is and isn’t working in our playing—which, NB, usually means in our practicing—and can point us towards solutions that bring more balance.

As we learn a new piece, we might take this approach: forest first, in a one-time hack-job through the piece, open-minded and forgiving, gleaning what we can of what it’s all about. Then, we designate a chunk of the piece to work on, and it’s trees, trees, trees, meticulously addressing what is needed in each small unit, each bar, each phrase. No stone left un-turned. In the care we take with each detail, we demonstrate to ourselves that we are taking the composer seriously, taking the piece seriously, taking seriously our own capacity to actually do this. In these initial two phases, we may each need to actively cultivate something less familiar to us, whether that means convincing ourselves that it’s okay to butcher the piece once or twice in the early stages (how nice it is to have a room of one’s own!), or disciplining ourselves to slow down, look close, pay attention, ask questions.

When we sense that we’ve had a sufficient initial experience of both forest and trees, then our practicing can move into a skillful dance that shifts between the two perspectives as needed. In any given practice session, we’ll reach for different tools at different times for different purposes. As we move towards polishing the piece, perhaps towards bringing it to performance, we will certainly feel the ways in which the whole is built from its parts. Our careful attention to each individual tree is what brings about our ability to understand and hear the forest. As we practice well, patiently addressing one thing at a time, the moment does come when the the cohesion of the piece comes into view, and we find we have access to whole new layers of musical understanding. Welcome to the forest! Whether the piece in question is easy, intermediate or monumental, this realization that we are grasping the whole can be nothing short of thrilling.

Though it’s obvious enough that our work on details supports our understanding of the whole, we may even find that the reverse is also true: a sense of the forest can support each tree. That is, holding a wide view helps us to keep all the details in perspective! Maintaining a broad, open mindset, we can be more skillful about giving the right amount of attention to everything that happens. Without this mindset, how often we waste far too much energy on relatively unimportant details simply because they are hard! A forest perspective can help us keep these things lighter, looser, less fraught. And—full circle—here we remind ourselves also that a trees mindset is what we need in order to transform those things from hard to easy. We acknowledge we need to shift back into detailed-oriented practice for a while, and we do it. As we move back and forth between these two perspectives in our practice, we begin to understand all the ways that forest and trees are mutually supportive. Our most effective practicing consciously harnesses the power of both.

We’ve examined several different applications of this idea of shifting our attention between the details and the (relative) whole. We see clearly that both the forest and the trees exist! We know which is which; we understand something of the relationships between them. We’ve thought about how we might consciously choose a perspective (forest or trees) that best meets our practicing needs today, and we understand how that may likely change tomorrow. And, outside of any specific piece we’re working on, we have taken stock of our own habits and considered how it may benefit us to actively cultivate whichever end of this spectrum comes less naturally. Before we leave this topic, let’s briefly touch on one more arena in which our analogy might be useful (as a muse, perhaps…. what follows is more To Contemplate than To Do…).

What I am referring to is that not only our most effective practicing, but also our most beautiful playing involves conscious choice of view. Perhaps what we hear in the music brings us to a very intimate, human perspective. Then our playing is loving, personal and close: we caress every detail. Our fingers stroke this nocturne’s cheek. Or maybe what we hear in our piece is something more like transcendence, or acceptance, or fate. In that case, our internal camera pans out, and we connect with the music on a different plane, beyond individual emotional expression. We can pull our view in, or or extend it as far as our imaginations can reach. Or place it anywhere in between. Choice of perspective is a tool available to us not only as a way to understand our own habits and tendencies and to practice well, but also as a set of possibilities that unlocks for us yet more (there is always more!) of the meaning and mystery of music.

How exactly we might play or practice differently, depending on our chosen view, is a matter for another post and another day (watch for a related practice tool, coming to subscribers next week!). But for now: let’s simply enjoy a long walk in the woods and take it all in.

After that, of course, we’ll come home and practice!