In early June, I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Miami Beach at the New World Center as a participant in the Sphinx Organization’s Audition Intensive. It was my first time participating in an in-person Sphinx program, and there were several valuable lessons that I learned from both the faculty and my colleagues. Today I want to talk about a technique called interleaving practice (which is a technique I first learned about while I was there, but that is otherwise a known method of practice) and how I’ve been applying it to my daily practice since coming home. 

My understanding of interleaving practice is that, if you plan on practicing for an hour, rather than spending, say, two consecutive 15-minute intervals working on orchestral excerpt A and then two consecutive 15-minute intervals on excerpt B, you instead spend 15 minutes on excerpt A, 15 minutes on excerpt B, then 15 minutes on excerpt A, and another 15 minutes on excerpt B.  

So, at the moment, I’m preparing for three auditions, and in order to balance the practice loads, I divided the lists and rearranged them based on levels of personal difficulty. In List A, I have the following: Mendelssohn 4 mov 1, Beethoven 7 mov 1, Higdon Harp Concerto mov 4, Nielsen 3 mov 3, Strauss Eulenspiegel Reh.35, Mozart 39 mov 4, Mozart 35 mov 4, and Koussevitzky mov 1. In List B, I have the following: Bach Violin Concerto mov 2, Beethoven 9 mov 4 Reh.K, Mendelssohn 4 mov 4, Shostakovich 5 mov 1, Tchaikovsky 4 mov 1, Beethoven 5 mov 3 Trio, and Bach 3 Bourrees.

In List C, which I’m not scheduled to begin work on until August 13th, I have the remaining excerpts: Beethoven 9 mov 4 Recitatives, Brahms 2 mov 4, Mahler 2 mov 1, Mozart 39 mov 1, Mozart 35 mov 1, Beethoven 5 mov 3 Scherzo, Haydn 31, and Wagner Die Meistersinger Reh.J. Each of these lists is a general guide, and I don’t always get through everything on whichever list I’m working on that day. It’s also important for me to say that I don’t simply sit down and work through each list from start to finish (that wouldn’t be a healthy approach for me). For each list, there are two practice sessions per day; I do the first half in the morning and the second half in the evening. 

Splitting the complete list allowed me to create an audition preparation timeline spanning 9 weeks (with checkpoints), and I’ve been able to alternate between an A Day and a B Day for the last month. For each of those days, there’s also a 30-minute warm-up factored into the beginning of the day, and this always precedes the actual repertoire work. On a given day, I interleave (to use it as a verb) the excerpts in the list, working on each excerpt in 15-minute intervals. The benefit of timing the practice intervals is that the timer stops me before I lose focus, and I can spend time working through smaller musical/technical concepts rather than thinking about my practice in terms of meeting a certain amount of hours per day. It’s not worth doing the math to figure out how much happens each day, because, again, there are also days when I feel that the work has been done and thus the number of intervals fluctuates. Overall, it’s been an interesting approach to test out, and it makes me feel like I’m doing less work than I actually am.

Another practice technique that I’ve tried to factor into this routine is recording! In the past I’ve been very reluctant to record my practice sessions, but I’m getting better at hitting the record button and diving in. Listening back is a great way to identify hiccups that I don’t always hear while sitting behind the instrument, so I’ve sort of begun to develop an appreciation for it. It adds a reflective element to my practice that allows me to make more informed decisions about my playing.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. I just thought it would be nice to write a short entry about my practice since this is how I spend a large part of my day, and because there’s much more to it than sitting down and running the music. Maybe in the future I’ll write another brief entry about what actually happens within those 15-minute intervals, but that might be too dry of a topic.