Erik Ralske plays the French horn. After 17 years in the New York Philharmonic, having reached the pinnacle of an orchestral musician’s career, he stepped back into the ring by auditioning for two other A-list groups: the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Astoundingly, he won both auditions. For non-musicians, that’s like winning three championships in a row.
Ralske is not one to rest on his laurels, and what he has to say about practicing and performing is well worth listening to. (And by the way, he chose the Met over Los Angeles.)
Below are some his gems, as presented in Noa Kageyama’s wonderful blog at bulletproofmusician.com.
Practice at performance tempo. Many young musicians, myself included, were taught to learn a new piece by practicing very slowly at first and gradually speeding up until the performance tempo is reached. In this common-sense method, you start at a snail’s pace and accelerate bit by bit over a long stretch of time until reaching the performance tempo.
Ralske, however, suggests trying another way: start learning right away at performance tempo. This would be like a racecar driver taking a practice lap on a new course pedal to the metal, so it may seem crazy at first glance, but according to Ralske, it’s often a more efficient way to practice.
Let’s say that you are learning a running passage of sixteenth notes. Rather than going the old way of setting the metronome to a very slow tempo and gradually speeding up until reaching the performance tempo, you would just set the metronome to performance tempo right away. However, to do it correctly, you have to go one note at a time. At first, Ralske recommends, just practice the first two notes in the run at tempo with articulations, dynamics and so forth. When those can be played at tempo, then add the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, etc. until the entire run has been mastered. This method may seem less efficient than the traditional method, but, as Ralke notes, when you get to, say, the tenth note in the run, you have already practiced the first nine many times at tempo. Practice guru Rob Knopper, who also learns new music this way, adds another positive effect: when you practice at tempo right away and learn the music one note at a time, you don’t have to relearn how to play it fast.
Subdivide. The essence of subdividing is to feel the pulse of a smaller note value underneath the larger note you are playing. For example, a quarter note can be felt as two eighth notes, or in a very slow tempo, four sixteenth notes. Ralske correctly notes that subdividing allows musicians to play together with precision, even at very slow tempos. For example, if I play four quarter notes of the melody before handing over the next four quarter notes to someone else, I can do so with greater precision by feeling an underlying pulse of eighth or sixteenth notes. Ralske likens it to completing a connect-the-dots drawing. Connecting the music through an underlying pulse allows the music to be seen more completely. He says that great orchestras learn how to play together even when the conductor’s beat is unclear. They do this by feeling a subdivided beat underneath the pulse of the music.
Predict the metronome. My favorite of Ralske’s ideas involves establishing a new relationship with your metronome, from being a follower to a predictor. Like most young musicians, I spent many agonizing years using a metronome, and how I wish I had heard about Ralske’s idea when I was sixteen. It’s a simple but very powerful idea. Instead of following the metronome and hoping that you will acquire an iron pulse—what he calls a passive use—you should learn to predict when the next click of the metronome will occur, what he calls active use. For example, you count “one” and “now” and “now” and “now” and so forth, so that the metronome merely verifies your prediction of when the next beat will occur. Rather than following, you are predicting and over time, your playing will become much more rhythmical. I’ve done this with students, and the results are stunning. More rhythmical playing occurs right away.