SassyBlonde

I know I've been talking about art a lot here lately, but it seems like I've been stumbling across amazing things all over the place. For instance, take a look at the picture on the left: the art in that bottle is painted entirely in sand. The artist is Andrew Clemens, who created these art bottles at the end of the nineteenth century from sand he collected from the river bluffs near his home in McGregor, Iowa. Every single grain of sand you see in the picture was meticulously placed using homemade tools, and there's no glue, paint, or anything other than sand in the bottles.

The complexity of thought and concentration required to create art of this microscopic magnitude is so inspiring to me-- it gives me momentum to go and pick apart the minute details of my own art. After all, if a man can sit day by day and exactly place single grains of sand to paint pictures, sometimes every day for an entire year, can't I have the intestinal fortitude to sit my ass down and practice for a couple of hours a day? You'd think.

No musician likes practicing. Not like you'd think of liking going shopping, or to the movies, or reading a good book. I remember thinking I must be crazy in music school-- all of these people surrounding me talking about how much they loved to practice-- six, seven hours a day. They'd rather practice than eat. I began to think I was surrounded by the equivalent of Opus Dei mortificationists until I began to see the chinks in their armor. I really think that adoration of practicing is one of the many cardinal lies of the music world. Enjoy playing, yes. Jamming, yes. Rehearsing, maybe, but actual honest-to-God practicing? Never.

Let me explain what I mean by practicing, by the way. I'm not talking about sitting down to play through music you enjoy. That may be part of it, and maybe the end result, but real practicing is a lot more brutal than that. When a good musician sits down to practice, it becomes an exercise in masochism. You subject yourself to a razor-edged mirror every time you begin, examining with microscopic detail every single flaw in your execution and slowly, methodically, you rid yourself of them with surgical precision. It sounds poetic, but like I said, it's brutal at heart. At best, it becomes a thrilling exercise when you finally get the passage or piece right, giving you a rush like any extreme sport. At worst, however, it's slow mental torture: every time you make a mistake, you suffer a little death at your own imperfection.

I have a feeling that this is what separates the brilliant musicians from the average ones. Musicians are supposed to be free spirits in the eyes of everyone else, bowing to the whims of their muse. What everyone else doesn't realize is that Euterpe may be the giver of pleasure, but she's a dominatrix at heart, ready to use the whips and chains more readily than a kind word. You have to be a clock-disassembler at heart to be a truly brilliant musician-- genius and meticulous attention to detail akin to that of a gifted neurosurgeon as well as discipline and strength of character to hone that skill to razor precision.

It's that self-discipline that makes the difference in the end: not every musician has the will to sit down every day and bend their will to the grinding monotony and punishment of hard work. The good ones do, the mediocre ones do sporadically, and the bad ones just don't or can't. There are actually lots and lots of people with more than enough raw musical talent to be great. It's really common, actually. What's rare is the combination of talent and self-discipline: the talent means exactly nothing without the discipline to train it. And that discipline is useless without the strength of will to look into that razor-edged mirror, which in combination with the former is as rare as hens' teeth.

I kind of feel like a monk every time I sit down to practice: it's a meditation, a prayer to whatever deity gave me that rare combination in the small mediocre measure that I own. At the same time, it terrifies me-- it has a life of its own, this cycle. Miss practicing and the guilt turns into anxiety, which feeds the heaviness of soul that leads to missing the next practice session, in turn increasing the guilt and anxiety. Is it any wonder that I was a basket case by the time I graduated music school (and believe me, I was way more sane than most people I knew)? I keep swearing to myself that this time will be different-- that I won't let it swallow me up and spit me out after the performance is over, but who knows? Anyway, less procrastinating and more practicing. I have penance to do.