Practice Makes Perfect Right?
The “Bangkok Rock Report” column by Benny White
When Glenn Kurtz was a kid, he wasn’t just a guitar player, he was a child prodigy who went from simple folk songs and Beatles tunes to playing complex classical compositions at the New England Conservatory.
At 12 he played a concert with jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie. Somewhere along the way, however, this gifted musician not only lost the passion for his instrument, but his belief in himself. When he was just 25 years old, Kurtz’s vision of worldwide success, which once seemed so within reach, fell from his fingertips.
But as he details so vividly in his new book, PRACTICING: A Musician’s Return to Music, Glenn Kurtz went on to discover a deep musical satisfaction beyond a life of stardom, and he shares his hard-earned insights and revelations in the following interview.
He graduated from Tufts University–New England Conservatory of Music (double-degree program) in 1985 and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in German Studies and Comparative Literature from Stanford University. He has taught at San Francisco State University, Stanford and California College of Arts.
How can a musician actually begin to take the practice experience from the mundane to the sublime?
Kurtz: Instead of thinking of it as repetition, think of it as a larger journey. If you understand where you’re going, you’ll see it, you’ll feel it, you’ll hear it. If you have the sense of a larger story and you think of practicing as something you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, then no amount of obstacle or frustration is enough to make you quit, because it’s all challenges along the way. Viewing it this way, practicing takes on a much larger context in which you almost expect a struggle. And looking at it that way takes the emotional edge off of any day’s disappointment, or anything that you’re having difficulty mastering, because it puts it in this context where you can give it all you have today, and then tomorrow you start again.
How did you practice at young age ?
When I was 12 or 13 years old, I heard Charlie Christian for the first time. I had been listening to jazz before that, but I had never come across a jazz guitarist like this; so clear and so slick. Of course, I too wanted to be able to play that way. I was focused before, but that really made me focus in new kind of way. This was the first time I really thought “Alright, if I really work hard, I can figure out how he’s doing that.” This was before all the new high-tech gear which allows you to slow things down a lot and work parts out. Anyway, I recorded the CD onto a cassette tape and I played it over and over and practiced with a very specific goal in mind, and that was to be able to reproduce this phrasing and clarity of playing.
As a kid, what was it like attending the New England Conservatory of Music?
Kurtz: When I arrived at the New England Conservatory, it was a complete sea change for me. It was a culture of practicing and people there were very serious. Before, it had just been me and a bunch of guitar players; now suddenly it was violinists and pianists. It was an absolute shock.
Doesn’t being surrounded by great players force you to bring your game up?
Kurtz: Absolutely! It focuses your attention and ambition in ways that you never imagined before. These people really brought me to the tip of my toes.
In your book, you write about the damaging aspect of competition at these high-level conservatories. Can you elaborate on that a bit more?
Kurtz: Competition is a double-edged sword. There is an element about it that is really positive. You see someone who is better than you and it really does sharpen your game. It makes you work a lot harder and pushes you past where you thought you could go. It’s great when you’re together with friends and you’re trying to outdo each other. That makes everybody better but, there’s also a very negative aspect involved; when you’re all competing for one place. There was that sense at the Conservatory when only one of us was going to make it but, there were 20 of us. When that occurs the competition becomes a bit more serious and the attitude changes. You’re trying to push others down and everyone becomes critical in a hurtful kind of way and then you internalize that as well. For me, it became a kind of a Lord of the Flies thing.
I think the worst kind of competition is the kind you have with yourself, where you start saying, “Why can’t I do that right?” You get very impatient with yourself and become self-destructive.
Some musicians reach a point where they feel frustrated and disappointed. A bitterness sets in and the instrument that was almost your soul mate, now becomes this almost evil entity. You’ve been through that. How can someone survive it?
Kurtz: What happened to me is that I had conceived this ideal of success for myself that was, by definition, unattainable for me. In classical guitar, there is a very specific kind of career path available to you. You are either a concert soloist or you teach and do gigs. And there is some ensemble playing in orchestras, obviously. I had the ideal of being a concert soloist and that wasn’t going to happen, but I think the lesson is that this ideal of success ruined my pleasure in music, and when this ideal collapsed I lost everything.
That is very dangerous and very common as well. I think it happens to a lot of people. If I learned something from coming back from the book, it’s really that your ideal of success can be more damaging than any actual failure or difficulty that you’ve experienced. Of course you’re going to get some frustration when you play. That always happens when you’re trying to improve at something. It’s inevitable. But sometimes that frustration feels like fate and you seem destined to hell. I think that’s a problem with one’s ideal, not the playing. It’s a problem with how you think about what it means to succeed. What allowed me to begin playing again after I suffered what was for me a very traumatic failure was to reconnect with the pleasure that I have in playing.
That’s a powerful theme in the book. Any musician reading it will not only get a lot out of it but also recognize themselves in your saga, and its positive ending.
Kurtz: Yeah, I think that there is something triumphant about it, but in a way that’s very different from the success that I had imagined. In the end, I was able to enjoy playing again and reincorporate this deep visceral pleasure back in my life when it had been excluded. In some sense it’s a problem in the story that you tell. I was talking before about practicing being a story. At first, I had a story that was designed to disappoint me and I learned to tell a different story and that’s what the book is about.
“What allowed me to begin playing again, after I suffered what was for me a very traumatic failure, was to reconnect with the pleasure that I have in playing.”
That’s great. What are you doing musically right now?
Kurtz: I’m practicing on my own for myself. Part of this new story is that I don’t set myself up as being a professional musician, so I’m not looking to do performances, at least not public performances. I give what I call performances for myself, but I’m playing both classical and jazz guitar again.
You’re redirecting, rewriting your story but you’re incorporating both the playing of the guitar with actual pieces. Are these pieces that you’re writing or are you performing some else’s music?
Kurtz: In classical, it’s just pieces that I’m playing or repertoire I’m learning that I’d never learned. I play some of the Bach violin music every day, just because it’s so wonderful and musical that it really demands everything that you’ve got.
There are so many centuries of great music that a musician really can’t get bored or bogged down, can he?
Kurtz: Right. And I recently discovered the whole repertoire of the Vihuela, which is a Spanish instrument from the 16th century that was lost and then rediscovered in the early 20th century when the guitar had a renaissance and people started doing scholarship about it. It’s a wonderfully small repertoire, about 600 pieces for this instrument.
So I’ve been learning that and working very slowly through Joaquin Rodrigo’s guitar music, which is quite difficult. It’s a little beyond me, actually, but I’m doing it just because it’s great music.
You’ve played with Dizzy Gillespie; you’ve played in front of thousands of people. Can you talk about taking the solitude of the practice room into the more social aspect of the rehearsal room? Are there any preparations that a musician needs to make for that first rehearsal or two with musicians who are new to you?
Kurtz: Do your homework. It’s easy to feel like the first time you rehearse with people that it’s a performance because you want to be your best; you don’t want to be holding other people back. So, you’ve got to do your homework so you know what you’re doing when you step into the room. Collective practicing and rehearsing is something I find enormously joyful and fulfilling; working together with other people to produce a piece of music.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s classical or in a band. I think that collective practicing makes out loud what is happening in your head when you’re practicing alone, because someone else will say, “Hey what if we did it this way,” or “That didn’t sound right, can we try this part again.” Working together is what you do in your head, but it doesn’t come out exclusively. When there are different people with different sensibilities, and the goal of achieving a performance together is to get the differences to coalesce or become absorbed in the piece of music, it becomes more exciting. So I always tried to enjoy that aspect of rehearsing.
Whether on video or audio, have you ever recorded a practice or rehearsal to get something out of it that you weren’t getting when it was actually occurring?
Kurtz: Yes. When I was at the Conservatory, I would record myself practicing and listen back to part of it, because sometimes your mind deceives you. The tape recorder is not exactly honest, but it’s brutally clear. It distorts certain things but it presents something in a very sharp definition that is helpful to hear.
For a player whose passion is, let’s say blues music, how could they approach practicing to make the music more interesting for the musician himself?
Kurtz: I think one of the most fruitful things you can do is cross pollinate, and that happened with me a lot because I was playing in many different styles. If you’re a blues guitarist and that’s the idiom you want to remain in, I think the tendency is to only listen to blues guitarists.
But you know, you can get a lot out of listening to punk, classical, great jazz guitarists and saxophone players in different styles.
It may be something about phrasing or certain harmonic possibilities that might be a little out there for blues, or might not come naturally within the blues idiom, but you hear it and it broadens the horizon around what you’re doing. It gives you an idea around what you want to incorporate and it’s really the ability to draw in these outside influences, kind of redefine them in the new idiom that makes idioms develop.
Some of the great guitarists in rock were influenced by out-there players. Jimi Hendrix would listen to avant-jazz guitarist Albert Ayler and he also played Bach pieces for his own enjoyment. You can hear cross-pollination at work in his music too…
Kurtz: Sure! So you know, just listen to great music, even if it’s not your style. There is always going to be something in it that you can absorb.
What’s your take on music teachers and how much they can do for a musician?
Kurtz: The role of a teacher is profound, but for the most part they don’t teach you something; they help you learn. They help you find your way of doing it and smooth the process in the best case.
Are books that teach technique worth while?
Kurtz: I think a lot of technique books ÐÐ because they don’t know you. They can’t see you and they’ve never seen your hands or heard you play so they make comments which are useful in general but not specifically. When I say you have to learn to do it yourself, like I was saying about expanding your horizons as a blues player, you have to take what people say and personalize it.
When I started, I was very young, maybe seven or eight years old. The technique that I learned at that time was the accepted technique of that era. It had certain flaws in it and I “perfected” those flaws. I learned those flaws perfectly. In some sense, I think they became worse flaws just because of the shape of my hands. The tendencies of my body, the way tension accumulates, it snowballed so that I had to unlearn some things.
It’s not that what they taught me was wrong, but it wasn’t specific to me. Everybody’s fingers are different. Classical guitarists can go on for hours and hours about the fingernail question, because everybody’s fingers are shaped differently. Should you have long nails or short nails? Well, it depends.
Every artist, performer, or musician has a different physicality and that musician needs to discover what that is, what he or she needs.
Kurtz: Yes, because your hands want to do it the easiest way possible and we often learn ways that contradict that. Playing guitar is not that hard. Pepe Romero, a wonderful guitarist and someone I took classes from, used to say, “Playing guitar is just wiggling your fingers.”