The Practice of Practice

Two students sit at two pianos down the hall from each other, working on the same eight bars. The first has the metronome at 72 and has played the passage, by the tally marks penciled in the margin, forty-one times since lunch. Each time it comes out a little cleaner — and then, around the sixth bar, the fourth finger catches on the same black key, and the student goes back to the top and starts again. The second student isn’t playing at all. The score is propped on the stand, and the student is singing the left-hand line under their breath, tapping where the hand has to turn over, marking in pencil where the harmony changes and where the thumb has to be before it’s needed.

Both are practicing, in two different ways, and the difference between them is about the oldest argument there is over how anybody gets good at anything. One way is repetition: do it again until the body has it. The other is harder to name. At best we can call it understanding — finding out what the passage is, how it’s built and what it asks of the hand, so that the playing comes out of knowing rather than out of having done it before.

This collection of essays mostly describes a practice too, social liberty as something people do rather than a thing they believe, and it has never quite settled how to describe what that doing is. The piano is a good place to look, because pianists have been fighting this argument out in public for two hundred years.

Sixty exercises

Repetition has the books. Carl Czerny, Beethoven’s pupil, wrote études by the hundred, The School of Velocity among them, and in 1873 Charles-Louis Hanon published Le Pianiste virtuose, sixty exercises meant to be played daily until the fingers are equal and independent. Generations of children have run Hanon’s first exercise up and down the keyboard while thinking about something else entirely, and in a sense that’s the design: the exercise is built to run without the mind.

It works, up to a point that’s easy to recognize. The first student’s passage will, by the hundredth time, be clean at 72, and probably at 80. Then it stops getting faster. Then at a lesson or on a stage, with the heart going and the hands a little cold, the sixth bar catches again, and because the passage lives only as a sequence the hands have run, the only way back in is from the top. Teachers call it a memory slip, but nothing was forgotten. It was a memory of motion, and it went where motion goes under stress.

Repetition can do worse. The story that Robert Schumann ruined his right hand with a contraption for strengthening the fourth finger is old and disputed, and the record doesn’t settle it. Leon Fleisher’s case is better documented: in 1964, at the height of his career, two fingers of his right hand began to curl under, and he spent most of three decades playing the left-hand repertoire and teaching before treatment for focal dystonia let him record with both hands again. Nobody can name a single cause for what happened to his hand. Dorothy Taubman, who retrained injured pianists in New York for decades, put much of the blame on drilling the fingers in isolation, and she rebuilt their playing around the rotation of the forearm.

Away from the keys

The second student’s way has a lineage of its own, though it’s harder to put in a book of exercises. Walter Gieseking and his teacher Karl Leimer argued in Modern Piano Playing (1931) for learning a piece by reading it away from the keyboard until it could be heard whole in the mind, before the hands ever touched it. In 1964 Glenn Gould told a graduating class at the Toronto conservatory about practicing Mozart’s Fantasia and Fugue in C major at thirteen, when a cleaner switched on a vacuum beside the piano. He couldn’t hear what he was playing, and the fugue got better. The passages he couldn’t hear at all, he said, sounded best of all, and he took from it that the inner ear of the imagination is a stronger aid to learning than any outside observation.

Understanding makes a different kind of player. The second student will be slower to bring the passage up to speed and may sound worse on Thursday. But when the sixth bar goes wrong on a stage, that student knows what harmony the bar sits in and where the hand was headed, and can come back in at the seventh. A passage that’s understood can be entered from any bar.

It has a failure of its own, and anyone who has taught has met it: the student who can explain a passage beautifully and can’t play it. Understanding that never reaches the hands is a description of music. And the forty-one tally marks in the first student’s margin aren’t wasted, either — somewhere in them the hand learned a few things no explanation would have taught it.

Repetition without repetition

The tennis serve looks like the perfect case for repetition. It’s the one shot in the game a player controls entirely, since nobody else has touched the ball, and coaches have stood players at the baseline with a basket of balls for as long as there’s been a baseline. Groove the toss, groove the swing, hit five hundred.

But the toss never lands in quite the same place, and the wind never blows the same way twice. In the 1920s the Soviet physiologist Nikolai Bernstein filmed blacksmiths striking a chisel and found that the hammer’s head arrived at nearly the same point every time while the joints of the arm that delivered it moved differently on every stroke. Skill, for Bernstein, wasn’t a movement repeated. It was a problem solved again each time, and he called practice “repetition without repetition.” Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis (1974) came at the same thing from the court: a player who talks themself through every serve — elbow up, toss higher — hits worse than one who watches the ball and lets the body find it.

Anders Ericsson’s 1993 study of violinists at the Berlin academy, the source of most of the later talk about ten thousand hours, usually gets cited as a vote for repetition. Read closely, it counts something narrower than hours at the instrument. What it counted was what Ericsson called deliberate practice — solitary work on a specific weakness, with full attention and feedback — which is repetition steered at every turn by understanding. Neither way, it turns out, gets far alone.

The ring at Appenzell

Public life practices both ways.

On the last Sunday in April the voters of Appenzell Innerrhoden, a Swiss half-canton, gather in the square at Appenzell for the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly with roots going back six centuries. They swear an oath, hear the business read, and vote by raising hands, and a man may still show his right to vote by carrying a sword. It’s repetition in its purest civic form, the same ceremony in the same square year after year, and it has kept alive something most of Europe gave up, a whole people deciding its own laws face to face.

It also kept women out. Neighboring Appenzell Ausserrhoden voted women into its assembly in 1989. Innerrhoden’s men voted it down again in April 1990, and that November the Federal Supreme Court ruled that the canton’s constitution had to be read to include them. Women voted in the ring for the first time in 1991. A practice carried by repetition carries everything in it, including parts nobody would defend if asked to explain them, and inside the ring nobody had to explain them, because doing it again was the explanation.

The other way has its examples too. In November 1772 the Boston town meeting appointed a committee of correspondence, which drafted a statement of rights and grievances and sent it to the towns of Massachusetts, asking each to consider it and reply. Many did, in their own meetings and in their own words — some agreeing, some adding grievances Boston hadn’t thought of, a few declining. Over the next two years the replies grew into a network that could think together without anyone in charge of it. The form repeated in every town, and what came back from each was a town working out what it understood.

How to describe what we do

Social liberty, as these essays have tried to describe it, is a practice before it’s a position: commissions held in public, an internal mind map of public life that a person carries and keeps redrawing, interfaces where one frame meets another. It’s tempting to describe that practice in the first student’s terms, as habits — show up, read the minutes, vote, do it again next year. Those things matter, and a practice without them is a mood. But repetition by its nature reproduces the frame it started in. Liberty, in the sense these essays use the word, needs a frame shift, and a frame shift is the one thing that can’t be drilled, since the drill is the old frame running.

It’s tempting the other way too, to describe the practice as a body of understanding, the right books and the right arguments. That’s the student who can explain the passage and can’t play it.

What the second student does at the piano comes closest. It isn’t the absence of repetition. It’s repetition that knows what it’s for, done slowly, with attention on where the hand is going rather than on getting through. A public that practices that way doesn’t have to go back to the beginning — to a founding, a revolution, a sacred text — every time the sixth bar catches. It can come back in at the seventh.

---

Sources: Carl Czerny, The School of Velocity, Op. 299 (c. 1833); Charles-Louis Hanon, Le Pianiste virtuose (1873); Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette, My Nine Lives (2010); Dorothy Taubman’s obituary, The New York Times (April 2013); Karl Leimer and Walter Gieseking, Modern Piano Playing (1931); Glenn Gould, “Advice to a Graduation” (1964), in Tim Page, ed., The Glenn Gould Reader (1984); Nikolai Bernstein, The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements (1967) and On Dexterity and Its Development (1996); W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis (1974); K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993); Swiss Federal Supreme Court, Rohner v. Appenzell Innerrhoden, BGE 116 Ia 359 (27 November 1990); Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (1970); this collection’s own Public Commission and Interfaces.