In Practice Heuristics I outlined several guiding principles for structuring one's approach to instrumental practice. Here, I will elaborate on the principle of "Separation of Craft and Art." When I last wrote on this subject, I suggested, "the goal is to make technique transparent in the same way that, ideally, the instrument itself is transparent when not malfunctioning." Using this as a starting point, I believe that a discussion of classical piano pedagogy would serve as an exemplar of a methodical appraoch to achieve these ends.
A musician desirous of instrumental technique should devote some time each day to the treatment of the instrument outside of the context of musical performance. The precise level of separation however, is difficult to establish. In the previous essay, I described the danger of enmeshing the acts of playing music and developing technique, namely the failure to do justice to either. However, the two are still necessarily linked. Technique is developed specifically as a means by which to play music. If totally estranged from the ends, the acquisition of technique becomes an aimless task. What sort of instrumental technique ought one to develop?
Here, I think an apt metaphor lies with the principle of encapsulation and layered architectures in software development and object oriented programming. Without delving too deeply: layers in a layered architecture are built on top of each other, each layer required only to know how to interface with the layer below it. Java code needs only to conform to Java coding standards and know how to interact with lower level libraries. The Java interpreter needs to know how to run on its host operating system. Further down the stack, the operating system needs to know how to interface with the hardware on which it is being run, services which it abstracts so that higher level activities need not know about them. These layers are not entirely isolated. Maintainers of Java libraries are keenly aware of the general needs of the Java programmers who rely on them. Engineers of operating systems are keenly aware of what sort of software will rely upon system calls to the operating system. But, ideally, there is a clean separation between these layers, allowing layers higher on the stack to perform advanced acts of computing without having to worry too much about all the underlying complexity (although they still need to pay attention to unnecessary complexity within their own work).
Here, as a musician, the metaphor becomes obvious. On the lowest level, the hardware consists of a human anatomy and an instrument, unless these happen to be the same entity. Higher up on the stack is the fundamental technique on which all higher skills are built, generally sound production, the proper movement of the fingers, the correct embouchure. These skills are enmeshed in the act of making music just as the operating system is enmeshed in the execution of any computer program, but here they are removed, isolated, and mastered. Classical pianists ritually execute such an act of separation in the daily practicing of methods like Hanon, which, although musically vapid, serve marvelously as the layer in between the performance of music and the musical hardware. In Hanon Ex. 1, the entire point of the exercise is to develop the capacity to play the interval of a third between the 5th and 4th fingers. This is a skill required in many pieces of music, however here the skill is developed in a far more industrious way than could ever be achieved merely by practicing music that occasionally requires it.
The dialog between the development of music for performance and the development of raw technique should be a fluid one. Problems unearthed in the act of practicing a piece of music should be treated with appropriate exercises and where none exist, new exercises should be created. While layers lower on the stack, like hardware and technique, determine the possibility space for an instrumentalist in the act of creating and performing music, the goal in developing these lower layers should be to make them as transparent as possible. Technique should be developed with an eye to allowing artistic decisions to be built on top of them. The technical achievements themselves should not usurp the artistic ends, leading to the creation of music that offers little more artistically than a slam dunk competition.
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