[.ca] The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the ... (ISBN 0609801775)

The Zen of Practicing!:
This book relieved me of so much anxiety and negativity! Though I spent years studying the piano, I always viewed practicing as a chore and would drive myself into a nervous, sleepless, frenzy of practicing before every recital. My final recital was twelve years ago -- I had worked myself into a horrible state, had come to despise the piece I was preparing (Beethovan's Six Variations), gave a lousy performance, quit my lessons and got rid of my piano. When a friend asked me to store his piano in our home I started playing again and was amazed to find that I still felt anxious although I was not preparing for any performance. My son's violin teacher loaned me this book and I must say if I'd read it twelve years ago I never would have given up the piano. Using this book I analyzed my physical approach to playing for the first time and realized my posture was horrible and I was actually clenching my teeth when I played! Now I am enjoying myself so much more and I feel so comfortable that I have started playing as an accompanist. There's much that's useful in this book though you may (like me) skip a lot of the technical information or parts that seem geared more toward professional musicians. I especially recommend this book for anyone with performance anxiety.

the Heart of the matter:
The srength of this book lies in its ability to inspire and offer some very practical approaches to becoming more self-aware both in practicing and performing. I liked the chapter on stretching and also the question and answer sections.I enjoyed alot of the stories that the author shared-one in particular on page 61 ..."Once, when the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky were about to go onstage to perform, one of them said to the other,"How are you feeling?" "Terrible," he answered, "because I'm no good." "I'm no good either,"the first said,"but we're no worse than the rest of them. Let's go." The weakest parts of the book for me as a professional musician and pianist(BM and MM in Piano)were those parts dealing with specific piano repertoire, musical analysis and technique.The writing pertaining to technique and analysis is very dry, unclear, and misleading in parts.Most of that could have been left out with no harm done to the book. There is nothing like a good teacher to make things clear, direct, and straightforward. That aside there is much in the book that can point the way to more freedom and inspiration in practicing and playing.

Pointless reading:
I bought this book at a time when I was going through some strange losses in my control of the sound and other strange stuff that happens from time to time to a musician, especially when he has to churn out weekly papers at Juilliard instead of practicing diligently. I have read it twice, trying to find anything of value. I found nothing. Much of her pedagogy is either a common knowledge or just hogwash, presented as if it were a revelation. There is much good and original in that book. However, whatever's good is not original, and whatever's original is not good. Finally, ask yourself, "Is Madeline Bruser a well-known pianist, with a great technique, awsome repertoire, wonderful tone, with musicality and imagination that have captured audiences' hearts?" You wouldn't know... for obvious reasons. Be my guest, search the internet for any evidence of her alleged concert career, you won't find any. Can she actually play piano? Any evidence?

Didn't serve my needs:
It is conceivable that some might find this book inspiring or useful, I was disappointed to find new insights fairly sparse. If you already recognize the importance of becoming spiritually and physically connected to your instrument, then this book will not be very satisfying. It is largely one person's experience (the author's) and the extent to which this might be useful to others is, well, variable. I can only remember two things about the book despite having re-read certain sections several times in search of possibly missed revealations: 1. too much time was devoted to relaxation exercises, and 2. the interesting brief anecdote about Rachmaninoff practicing. The latter item helped me envision what I would view as a more useful book: one that surveys the practicing approaches/methods used by a wide variety of effective musicians. This sort of book would give the reader a wide array of tried and true practicing approaches to experiment with.

Changed my perspective on music:
Madeline Bruser's book is one of the most insightful books I have ever read. Reading it gave me a whole new perspective on practicing and music in general. Too many musicians (including me) spend hours berating themselves for not being good enough. "Why am I bothering to spend hour after hour practicing? I don't have enough talent. There's so many better performers out there. I'll never get this piece to sound right." This book takes those questions, and instead turns them into a source of encouragement: "So I'm frustrated with how this piece sounds. That's good -- it means I care about the music. If I didn't have any talent, then music wouldn't matter so much to me." Madeline teaches you how to take the hours and hours of boring, finger-numbing, mind-numbing drudgery that so many musicians feel compelled to spend at their instrument and transform it into a practice session where you accomplish more with less time, energy, and frustration. She starts with advice about basic mechanics such as posture and stretching, and moves on to a discussion of the typical styles of "struggle" exhibited by most musicians (her descriptions are hilarious!) Finally, she concludes with a way of practicing that replaces the unproductive, repetitive struggling that so many musicians see as their only way to improve. Her style of practicing is one that will teach you how to really hear the music you produce, how to remain calm even in the most difficult musical passages, and how to concentrate on what you're doing without losing your focus (a problem that many musicians encounter.) Basically, after reading this book I was able to have a practice session which felt, not physically and emotionally draining as before, but actually invigorating. Many musicians find that, after years of endless practicing, they have lost much of their love for the music itself. Madeline's book teaches you how to find it again.