Quotes About Practicing

Quotes About Practicing


When we explode the artificial categories of exercise and real music, each tone we play is at once an exploration of technique and a full expression of spirit.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Don't mistake activity for achievement. Business does not equal productiveness.

Let the time you spend with art flow through three natural phases: invocation... work...gratitude.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Acquiring a technique in the world of music is a much misunderstood term. If there is a technique at all, it is the drawing out and integrating of all parts of the person. One needs imagination with clarity, drive with sensitivity.

Herbert Whone

To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Patience is the key to learning music. It requires time to take root in the soul before it can blossom. There is no rushing nature.

Nancy Lesh

What counts is not the number of hours you put in, but how much you put in the hours.

We think of practice as an activity done in a special context to prepare for performance or the "real thing." But if we split practice from the real thing, neither of them will be very real.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Some people succeed because they are destined to, but most people succeed because they are determined to.

Concentrate on your task.

Gandhi

If we do not strive for inner perfection, we will remain what we are now, talking animals. The perfect man, the complete man, lies within each of us.

Singing instrumental music is most important because, while you play an instrument, you are singing through the instrument...actually, you are singing inside.

Ali Akbar Khan

Intensify your path, immerse yourself in sound.

Joska Soos

The difference between good and great is consistency.

ESPN

The start of every true advance must be accompanied by a readiness for sacrifice and involvement. In addition, one must also have the capacity fully and willingly to acknowledge something greater than oneself.

Marius Schneider

Though it is good to start your study of an instrument with a classically trained musician, because of their attention to detail and desire for purity of sound, at a certain point you need to move away, because their obsession with "perfection" is life threatening to the music.



Whoever learns by listening, mainly playing his own music, and doing without notation (or at most making reluctant and incomplete use of its possibilities), leaves music where it belongs: In time where listening is the prime sense. Whoever learns a piece of music by reading it, principally playing the music of others and perfecting notation to an ever greater extent, transports music into an ultimately alien dimension: Into space whose cardinal sense is seeing.

Joachim-Ernst Berendt

Sarasate, the great Spanish violinist of the last century, was once called a genius by a famous critic. In reply to this, Sarasate shook his head and snorted: "Genius! For thirty-seven years I have practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genius."



Perfect your art in the wee hours of the morning, when all is still.

Nicolas Roerich

Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens. If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline and endurance. They get a beautiful heart.

Shinichi Suzuki

Repetitious practice without proper attention to detail probably does more harm than good.



The question is whether a noble song is produced by nature or by knowledge. I neither believe in mere labor being of avail without a rich vein of talent, nor in natural ability which is not educated.

Horace (65 - 8 B.C.)

Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul.

Plato

Practice in minute detail until every note is imbued with internal life and has taken its place in the overall design.

Pablo Casals

By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique, but by concentrating on technique one does not arrive at precision.



Many people say that too much study kills spontaneity in music, but although study may kill a small talent, it is a must to develop a big one.

George Gershwin

Repetition is the mother of talent.



Technique is the ability to lay open the basic sense of a great work of art, to make it clear.



The music teacher came twice a week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.

George Ade