The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 012 Jason Haaheim: The Science, Power, and Joys of Deliberate Practice

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 12. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, Dr. Renée Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. Today, I speak with Jason Highheim, principal timpanist with New York's Metropolitan Opera since 2013. We discuss his fascinating journey going from working full-time as an engineer to holding one of the most coveted positions in the world. The way he applied the principles of deliberate practice in his life will amaze and inspire you. We also talk about talent, the importance of being process-focused, and the benefits of recording yourself when you practice.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Jason holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in music performance and physics and a master's degree in electrical engineering. While auditioning and freelancing, he worked full-time as a senior research and development engineer at a Chicago-area tech company. His love of music motivated him to figure out how to maximize his practicing methods following the principles of deliberate practice and the scientific method, and his rigorous and methodical application of these principles led him to his success. Today, in addition to his performances at The Met and at Carnegie Hall, Jason is on faculty at NYU Steinhardt School of Music in the Bard Conservatory, and he gives masterclasses nationally and internationally.

Starting point is 00:01:42 He's been invited to play as guest timpanist with some of the world's best orchestras and also performs extensively as a chamber musician and jazz drummer throughout the country. I strongly recommend that you visit his website at jasonhaheim.com where you can read his incredible articles on deliberate practice and consult the great resources he has there for you. Jason's experience and insight on deliberate practice and music making are eye-opening. I had such a great time talking with him and I hope you'll love this conversation as much as I did. Let's go to the show. Jason, hi, hi. It's really great to have you on the show. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. I first heard about you from a blog post that you published in April of 2017 about your process to

Starting point is 00:02:40 secure your position with the Met. And I was immediately drawn in because, well, first of all, your writing style is highly engaging. And by the way, anyone listening to this, you need to visit Jason's website after you're done with the episode. He's got tons of awesome articles that are full of great info, really funny. And he also has really great resources on the website. So head out to jasonhaheim.com and I'll put a link in the show notes. But anyway, back on topic, I was really intrigued because in the article that I was just mentioning, you were describing the effects of a topic that I am extremely passionate about, deliberate practice. And, you know, it's like, it's like you and I belong to the same deliberate practice church. Yeah, evangelists.

Starting point is 00:03:30 Exactly. And I'm just so thrilled that we have the chance to talk about your process and approach to practicing and preparing for auditions. And I'm also really impressed with your attention to details and how you learn your part for the opera, making sure that every detail matches the emotion being portrayed in the libretto and the storyline. But before we dig into these fun subjects, I would love for my listeners to hear your story in your own words, because you have quite a fascinating story. So can you please tell us about what you call your unorthodox tale how you got to where you are and how your artistic path has unfolded yeah you got it thanks for all that by the way that's a it's very flattering and humbling to hear that and

Starting point is 00:04:17 it's it's always nice to know that uh you know people are getting getting helpful things from the stuff that i put out there and and write so uh the quick version of the unorthodox route my my path to the Met is that, you know, I really started as a totally lazy amateur musician. I just doing it cause I enjoyed it. I picked up piano in fourth grade, kind of on a lark. I started playing in the elementary school band in fifth grade really on, on percussion only because it seemed kind of cool and special in our school

Starting point is 00:04:58 district, you couldn't play percussion unless you'd had piano. So that was just another completely fortuitous coincidence. My parents were totally supportive of all this, but they were never harping on me to do this, that they are neither of them professional musicians. So there wasn't really that influence growing up being like, oh, well, you have to take lessons and you need to do this. Far from it. It was just like, oh, you're interested in doing that? Cool. Yeah, we'll help out no problem and it really remained that way for a long time you know and it wasn't until i was in high school um that i started to get more serious about playing but still even at that point it wasn't like career-oriented thinking um it was it honestly it began hormonally because i met a

Starting point is 00:05:47 girl at summer camp and she was a bassoonist playing in the all-state orchestra and she saw me playing in this talent show at the camp and I was I was playing drums and she was like oh that was really cool you're like this great drummer you must be going to all-state and I was like oh yeah totally definitely doing that I had no idea what she was talking about So basically, just to impress a girl, I asked my friends about, well, what is this Allstate thing? And what's it about? And they're like, yeah, it's kind of this group of the best young musicians in Minnesota where I grew up. And they audition for this thing and they practice for a long time and the best ones get selected for this. And my next question was like, oh, so I should, if I want to do that, I should at least probably start taking percussion lessons, which I hadn't been at that point. And they were like, yeah, duh, right? Like, that's going to be pretty important. So I started taking lessons at that point with a guy named Bob Adney, who I still know and work with.

Starting point is 00:06:52 He was, you know, my first percussion teacher. And we now present at the McPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis, a timpani seminar during the summer. And along with that, a deliberate practice boot camp where I try to convey a lot of these methods that we'll get into. So it's kind of nice to have that connection to the past. But, you know, he was the first person I started working with. really against all odds, I got into Allstate. And it was at that point where I'd never played with an orchestra before. And at that first rehearsal, I started to realize, oh, I actually think I might love this. Like, you know, whatever my motivations going in, I think this is actually

Starting point is 00:07:37 something I'm really into. And that persisted through college where I was a double major in physics and music, yet I was still not seriously considering music as a career. It was, you know, I had always had this influence in science from my dad. He was a, you know, an engineer and physicist by training. He taught high school physics for a while. And, you know, I kind of had that in mind. It's like, yeah, I think that's what I want to do for my job. And it wasn't until i was in graduate school i was still playing um i was at the university of california santa barbara doing a phd in electrical engineering and i was really missing music and so i was playing in the university orchestra one of my friends there you said hey you know you really seem into this have

Starting point is 00:08:28 you ever done a summer festival you ever considered something like aspen and you know in parallel to the previous time i said what's aspen i had no idea what this sort of summer festival ecosystem was all about and they explained it i did some homework i looked it up i made an audition cd and again sort of against all odds uh i i got in um you know having not been somebody who was doing a lot of orchestra excerpt type study and not not in that vein um you know i i can see in retrospect how very far i had to go to actually be serious about this but i went that summer and it was it was very um you know it was a big inflection point for my concept of what i wanted to do because i got to see you know real kind of professional musicians in flesh and blood

Starting point is 00:09:24 not just on this kind of magical pedestal that i had been conceiving of them up till that point You know, I would go to Minnesota Orchestra concerts as a kid, and I loved it, and I saw what those guys were doing, and I was laboring under this false idea that, like, well, they were born talented, and whatever they have, I just must not have that, and so I'll just do this for the fun of it and as a, you know, a hobby, basically, but I don't think I'm ever going to be able to make it there, right? that just seems impossible. And it was that first summer at Aspen where it didn't, it didn't change that completely, but it started to at least chip away at it. You know, I started to think, oh, well, I see these people are real human beings. Also, I totally love this. And when I got back for my PhD program, I kind of had to acknowledge to myself, like, I'm not sure my heart's completely in this like the physics thing like i like it well enough i'm decently good at it but i really love the music thing i really love performing and more than that i love the process of it all i love

Starting point is 00:10:38 digging into this stuff and and practicing and geeking out on it and and really just that immersion um you know we can probably get more into the process side of it later but it was at that point that I took a job at a company in Chicago. It was a nanotechnology company called Nano Inc. And the great thing about Chicago is that I had proximity, not just to the Chicago Symphony, but to the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. And, you know, for your listeners, they probably know that this is kind of an excellent training program and almost an apprenticeship with the orchestra. And I set one of my goals to get into that, and I eventually did. And I started asking around for great timpani teachers, eventually got connected with a great timpanist

Starting point is 00:11:33 named John Tafoya, who was the former principal timpanist in the National Symphony and now is the Director of Percussion at Indiana University. And that relationship, but also one thing in particular that he told me was the kind of missing piece. He recommended a book called Talents is Overrated. And that was my first exposure to the concepts of deliberate practice, But also this idea that the entire way I'd been thinking about talent, that really this received notion that many of us just encountered growing up and kind of never gets challenged, was not just wrong, but provably wrong. That there was a field of research out there looking into this that had decisively concluded inborn natural talent is just not a thing. Or to the extent that there are variations in the way young people pick things up, it really bears no correlation ultimately with the people that have the best odds of success in the long run. What instead matters is this thing called deliberate practice. The way you practice, how you design it, the way you go about it smartly, working hard for a long time, and that that is this real key to doing this.

Starting point is 00:13:01 And at that point, everything started to make a lot more sense to me in terms of how I was approaching this and my own practicing sort of the trajectory of that effectiveness skyrocketed. And from that point, you know, I had been taking auditions, but I wasn't really getting anywhere with it. And once I started figuring out not just how to practice, but sort of the entire point of it all, things really started to turn around. And, you know, it started with me advancing out of prelims once and then a few times and then consistently and then, you know, getting to finals once and then a couple times consistently. And then the stars aligned at the Met. And that was amazing because, you know, it's an absolute dream job. It's an incredible privilege to play in an orchestra like the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. And, you know, I try to keep in mind, it could have gone so many other ways, right?

Starting point is 00:14:01 Like any of us in these positions have gone through usually lots of these auditions and sometimes they're really, really close. And you just, you know, you don't know which one is going to finally connect. And that it, for me, was the Met is just kind of a dream come true. That's really, really, really incredible. You know, I love how you got to these turning points that you mentioned that you call inflection point. And I can see the scientists in you there. And, you know, something lit a spark in you and you found your passion.

Starting point is 00:14:37 And you didn't let the fact that you don't fit the traditional mold of what a professional musician's trajectory looks like, and you just followed your interests and figured out a way to get to where you want. That's so inspiring. My favorite thing about you, I think, is your process. And as someone who studied the work of Anders Ericsson for her doctoral dissertation and tries to apply those principles in her playing and teaching, I feel like you're really an amazing example of how powerful these principles of deliberate practice and the scientific method can be when they're applied to musical practice. I love how in one of your blog posts, this trajectory that you mentioned is just really what it's all about. And it's so important for so many of us to hear about this. It looks like you took those principles and run with them in the way that is so, as I said, inspiring and rarely done to this extent. Can you please unwrap deliberate practice for us? Sorry, I know it's kind of a big question. It is. Yeah, we could go for like 16 hours on that, you know, the length of the entire ring cycle or something. But yeah, I can try to kind of get it in a nutshell. I mean, in a way, maybe the place to start is that there's this question I get a lot, which is sort of like, oh, do you miss science or like, you know, these two really distinctly different parts of your work or your output, your personality, you know, your the right left half of your brain, all of that. it's interesting because it frames it as this dichotomy when in fact to me it has always felt much more um sort of cross influential and and supportive in a way the easiest way to describe deliberate practice is kind of what you said already it is the scientific method applied to refining the crafts on our instruments and a lot of people i think you know hear that kind of thing

Starting point is 00:16:36 And they're like, well, wait a minute, hold on. I mean, come on, science boy, we're artists here. This is all about emotion and passion and art and all this stuff. And I hasten to add, yes, that's absolutely true. It is all ultimately about the expressivity, the artistic aspect of it, musicianship, all of these things. But at some point, we have to ask ourselves, what is this ultimately based on? Like, you know, we study fundamentals for a reason, not just because our teachers tell us we have to, not just because, oh, you know, people like it when we play in tune, but because, you know, for my way of thinking about this, our artistic expression is going to be more effective the better our fundamentals are. I think about an analogy to visual art, where, you know, if you're a sketch artist or something, you want to draw a compelling picture for people. But if you can't even draw a straight line or a nice curve, like, good luck doing that, right?

Starting point is 00:17:42 And so if you think about like how we go about refining the craft, this grueling, arduous, incremental process, it kind of makes sense then that, oh, well, we should be fairly scientific about this. And that if the scientific method is basically coming up with a hypothesis to explain something, gathering data, getting feedback, checking it, and then seeing if it worked out, well, my goodness, that's what we do when we practice. We've got a piece we need to play. We've got an excerpt we need to play in an audition. We're doing a concerto, something like that. And we need to get better at doing it. And we've got a set of problems we need to solve. And there's going to be ways to solve those problems and ways to improve our playing that are more effective or less effective. And the way we go about it is we practice and we test, ideally by recording ourselves, playing for other people, seeing if the intention of our musicality is really getting through.

Starting point is 00:18:49 and then you you know that's that's the feedback back part that's that's the sort of analyzing the data and if we're being effective at that then yeah we're being musical and and you keep the feedback loop going and that's the process that's the trajectory um there are lots of attributes of deliberate practice that go into that and i've been sort of cataloging those on on my website or through my blog, and I continue to do that. And I plan to write a lot more about it. And we could get into a lot of those specifics, but that's the gist of it. I think for people that haven't really encountered the concept of deliberate practice before, it's the scientific method applied to practicing, applied to the craft of your instrument with the simultaneous

Starting point is 00:19:39 acknowledgement that whatever concept you've had for talent, whatever you think that means, the research indicates it's not like innate talent is not really a thing, or at least it's not a thing that connects to what we do in our musical careers in the long run. Yes, absolutely. The way you talk about it really speak to me. And I love how you say that art and science are, I think the words you use were cross-influential and supportive. And even looking at deliberate practice itself, it's both a science and an art. You know, the nuances are so subtle and you can't have a rigid approach to it. It requires so much flexibility and imagination and creativity. I just, yeah, I love the way you put it. And exactly the way you said

Starting point is 00:20:34 it, it's problem solving. I know that when I teach a lesson, I love teaching something to a student, But even more so, I love how if I can teach them how to problem solve once they get home with the knowledge that they have to extrapolate these notions that they have and see if they can fix it at home when they're not with me. You know, a big principle I find is this kind of a Buddhist approach to it, thinking of keeping a beginner's mind, of, you know, keeping track of your fundamentals, but also keeping this curiosity to always investigate and push things further. You know, you talked about these auditions that you took. How about audition preparation? As you mentioned in your story, you have a really solid audition experience. You took many and lost most. And I love how you call in one of your articles, you call yourself a tenacious loser and how you reframed it all as constructive growth and refined that process along the way and finally went on to win your dream job.

Starting point is 00:21:46 How is that audition preparation process for you using deliberate practice? Yeah, good question. another big question i i will try to keep it um concise in answering that but i think one of the keys to start with there is you know so i had some of those inflection points in my own musical growth there were things about understanding deliberate practice how to practice how to you know work on variables in my own playing some of which are subjective and some of which are objective, right? But then there was also this kind of bigger philosophical realization, which was, I need to be invested in this for the process and not any one specific

Starting point is 00:22:30 outcome. And there's, I think, a good philosophical reason for that. But I think there's also a much more pragmatic reason for that. Starting with a pragmatic reason, there are way too many really good musicians in the world, right? And depending on your perspective, that's either a great or terrible problem. I think it's great that a lot of people have exposure to music and have the joy of playing an instrument and refining their craft and everything that goes along with that. The problem, of course, is that there are not nearly enough full-time orchestra jobs that can pay a living to support all the people out there studying music and you know if you're a listener and this is the first time you've heard that boy i'm sorry to break that news to you but

Starting point is 00:23:20 that's like that is a reality you'll have to get around here pretty quick um and you know i think as a consequence of that if you're only in it because you're like well i need to get that big orchestra job, who boy, like nobody can promise you that. Right. Like, or maybe put it this way, anyone that promises you that that can happen is either lying or trying to sell you something, right? Like there, there are no guarantees in this, in this. And so, and I knew that going in, And I knew that like, yeah, this might not all work out. And it sort of proposed for me two really distinct questions I wanted to be asking myself as I really started to dig into this.

Starting point is 00:24:11 The first was related to the things that are written about in Talent is Overrated by Jeff Colvin, also the stuff that Anders Ericsson himself writes about in the book Peak. Like, but rather than asking myself this question that I know a ton of students struggle with, which is like, am I good enough? Do I have what it takes? All you want is to have some teacher tell you, kid, you got it. You're going to be a star, right? Like, nobody can tell you that.

Starting point is 00:24:40 I'm sorry. There's just too many variables in there. And too much of it is up to you and the decisions you make over years. Yes. Right? So rather than asking yourself, am I good enough right now? What I wanted to consider for myself and what I'd love for my students to consider is, am I willing to do the work? Am I willing to put in the time and those many, many thousands of hours, 10, 20, 30,000 hours on this to really refine this? Right. Am I willing to do that work? Right? That's the first question.

Starting point is 00:25:19 Now, I was going to say, because the outcome is never in your hands, but the process you can control. You can control the process. The outcome is something that you only have partial control over that at best, right? So the second question I was asking for myself is knowing that, accepting that. If I forecast 5, 10, even 15 years down the road, and at that point, I haven't quote unquote made it, whatever I'm defining for myself, however people choose to frame this kind of arbitrary and slippery definition of success, if I haven't made it, will it have been worth it? which is to say, do I enjoy the process of this kind of regardless of the outcome? And if so, yeah, do it, go for it, invest 110%, right? And for me, I kind of knew where I was at and I was, I think, honest enough in my introspection that I said, yeah, I am willing

Starting point is 00:26:28 to do the work. And yes, it will have definitely been worth it because I love the process. I love the life experience of doing this, I find it enriching so that even if I don't get that big job, I will still be glad that I did all this work. That to me is the key of detaching from specific outcomes and instead focusing on the process. It goes hand in hand with being what I said is a tenacious loser. Basically knowing that I'm going into this process, going into many, many auditions, knowing that the outcome of any individual one of these things is not entirely in my control. There are certain things I can control. I can control my process. I can control my preparation. I can measure objective aspects of my playing, like

Starting point is 00:27:19 time, rhythm, intonation, clarity, all of these different things that are really inarguable and and you know big groups of musicians that are on audition committees ought to be able to agree but then there's the subjective things then then there are the aspects of of real musicality phrasing and tone and style and energy and personality and all of these other things that ultimately matter the most for winning the job but that you know going in you cannot read the minds of the people on the committee you don't know exactly what they're expecting. And more specifically, that can be changing from day to day, right? Like the composition of orchestra audition committees can be different on different days of prelims,

Starting point is 00:28:06 semis, and even finals sometimes. And, you know, you really have to kind of go in. Sometimes I think of the analogy on some of these cooking shows where, you know, you're given the chance to make the dish that you're best at, right? And you do everything you can, you put everything you can into it you have your version of what you like and what you think is the best and then you present it to people and they might like it or they might not and if they don't like it that's not an indictment of you as a person that's not you know invalidating your musicianship it's just saying hey you know what you played that um that tchaikovsky timpani part like really big and and you know kind of a huge sound and articulate or something like that and you know

Starting point is 00:28:55 here at this orchestra we we take a more laid-back approach our Tchaikovsky's you know more suave or something like okay cool you can't know that in advance and it you can really drive yourself crazy going in circles kind of chasing your tail to try and game that out and and it still stems from basically having this attachment to an outcome that is just not entirely in your control. That is so true. And when you're process oriented too, I find that, well, it works really well for me. I find that it keeps me open-minded to try new things. It helps me see solution. When I really focus on the process, the level of enjoyment I get is not negligible. And I find that it really helps me actually progress faster and get to my goals a little more quickly.

Starting point is 00:29:48 Yeah. And just to add like a tag comment on that. I mean, I think in the long run, sort of back to the bigger philosophy aspect of this, I think the problem with attaching to an outcome is that then, assume you're among the lucky few for whom that outcome is favorable, right you win the job whoa oh my god okay great well okay now what right like i think there's there's this also this phenomenon that gets documented with olympic athletes a lot of the time where you know they'll they'll be going after this goal and they'll get the gold medal at the olympics and then they enter this kind of depressive state where they're like okay well now what do i do i did that what's next you know and it illustrates in a way i think the

Starting point is 00:30:43 the danger of having a non-process-based way of thinking about this because for me the extension into a performing career was just ah great my process continues You know, my process was, I am sort of maniacally invested in getting better at Timpani. And knowing that if I invest in this and I do this for long enough, good things will come about as a byproduct of that investment in the process. I don't know exactly what they're going to be. I don't know where I'm going to land. I can be reasonably confident that if I do this and I do it consistently, I'll have playing opportunities. I can earn a living somehow through a combination of teaching and freelancing and

Starting point is 00:31:36 doing all that. And I was, you know, when I was living in Chicago, I was doing that. I was happy with this combination of things. Then as a by-product of my process, this kind of biggest possible job went my way and and it was a thrill but now that i've been on the job this is my sixth season you know i can tell you that the process it never ends right like you you never get to stop thinking about getting better the the moment you stop that's that's when like artistic death sets in right right it's not like he won the audition and lived happily ever after yeah that's not a thing. That's just, that's not real life. To me, the whole project of this is that I get to continue thinking about the process and how to refine it and how to get better. That for me,

Starting point is 00:32:33 teaching is yet another tool I have to reflect back on my own process. A lot of teachers will talk about that. Once you have to turn around and start trying to explain the way you've done things it you have to ask more questions about yourself and that almost always makes you better and more effective what you were doing originally um i absolutely believe that and so you know the process is never ending there there is no point at which you say okay you're done like i'm done made it i'm at the top of the mountain i can just stop practicing now like that's that's just completely not the way this world works and so so for me it was basically a really natural extension to think i've got this process i've dedicated to and you know now just the

Starting point is 00:33:23 the it's going to have a slightly different form that it takes because it's not focused on audition preparation but rather you know performance preparation and ensemble playing but it's still you know basically the same dna for all of it yes and you know i would really love to hear about that preparation for repertoire but if we go back to the audition process would you mind breaking that down a little bit for us what that process is for you you know in the what practical steps you know you get the audition list what next how did you proceed because i i have read some really interesting articles and listened to a few podcasts that you were on and i just loved hearing about how you went about to prepare for these auditions yeah the the audition

Starting point is 00:34:15 preparation process is a you know for me was a complete outgrowth of thinking about deliberate practice and how you apply it to this thing right and again just to be clear you know when we were talking about deliberate practice at the beginning, that it's the scientific method applied to refining the craft. In our case, it's the craft of instrumental music, but this is generally applicable. This is sports. This is chess. This is people in management seminars talking about this. It's a generalized method for improvement. And some of the attributes of it are that your you know, your practice sessions are specifically designed to improve your performance. That sounds like kind of, yeah, duh, of course, that's going to be that way. But it's amazing to me how many

Starting point is 00:35:05 people will kind of like show up in the practice room and be like, oh, okay. And you're like, what do I feel like working on today? Like not having a plan, you know, it requires you to work outside your comfort zone. You want to have, as a part of this plan, you want to have some pretty specific goals. You need to be constantly incorporating feedback loops, which can take lots of different forms. For me, self-recording was a hugely important thing. Mock auditions are another big one. This all works best when it's coached by a really good teacher or teachers, in my case. You know, both for specific things about your instrument and how you're playing and some musical concepts, but also really just for the design of your practice process itself.

Starting point is 00:35:52 You know, like you were mentioning, giving people the tools to do as much as possible on their own, really being their own teacher. Because for any of us, whether it's being in school, whether it's, you know, getting into an audition preparation process on your own, when you're out of school, so much of this time is spent on your own, basically solitary confinement in the practice room feel like it yeah and a lot of this then becomes about like how do i make that time as effective as possible inevitably massive repetition is going to be a part and a hallmark of technical improvement um it's really mentally demanding and So you have to be attentive to your, you know, almost, I call it sometimes life engineering,

Starting point is 00:36:43 just, you know, making sure that you structure your days to enable you to practice when you are going to be aware and focused, you know, trying to avoid practicing past that point of diminishing returns where like, you know, it's, it's getting kind of late at night and you're really, really tired, but you're like, oh, I need to get in another half hour. there's something about that that's i think attractive to people who are like oh i'm just gonna i'm just gonna like muscle my way through it um i tried to avoid that i i i thought to myself you know i would rather be well rested for the next day and get you know a half hour of good practice in which is probably going to be more effective than like two hours when i'm just like

Starting point is 00:37:27 really unfocused and not able to think straight you know um kind of going in tandem with all this then is that uh you know i've called it the the obsession with continuous refinement that it's it's this process fixation rather than a specific goal that's driving this this this kind of helps maintain the willpower to get back in the practice room day after day after day and keep you know working and refining and shaping and molding, getting things incrementally better bit by bit by bit. And one of the things that Anders Ericsson has written about more recently is this concept of mental representations. And it's a bit of an abstract idea, but when I try to explain it to people, I'll say something like, okay, imagine an excerpt you play

Starting point is 00:38:23 all the time. Imagine a, you know, concerto exposition that you are intimately familiar with, right? And now sit and just like take 10 seconds and imagine yourself playing it the best possible way you can. You sort of, you know, you take a beat, you think about that and you hear it in your mind's ear, you sort of visualize it in your mind's eye. And whatever that thing is for you that is that is your mental representation of that thing and it's actually really important because that thing is not static in time it evolves with you it certainly evolves the better you get in part because your actual perception is changing and evolving with you as you put in all this time. The perception of things like rhythmic placement and clarity and the tone of notes

Starting point is 00:39:18 speaking and intonation between various intervals, all of these things, I know for a fact, I am much more perceptive of this now than I was 20 years ago. And as a consequence, my visualization, my mental representation of me playing some of this stuff is more nuanced and sophisticated it than it used to be. And so with all of that in mind, I developed these practice systems for myself that tried to basically leverage as much of that and kind of harness that process into something that was really methodical. I had a system of self-recording every day, listening to these specific things, playing something immediately, listening back, checking it with the metronome but then also checking it just by listening and tapping along with myself just

Starting point is 00:40:13 seeing like am i playing this with good time and rhythm it is amazing how if you don't do that consistently how shocked you can be when hearing sometimes your own playing it's not always comfortable right it's not easy it can be um a bit of a blow to the ego if if you haven't gotten into the habit of consistently self-recording and you start um you might be in for a surprise i i've also encountered some students who are like oh you know i i really don't like self-recording because like i don't know i just i i don't like how i sound when i do that and i often say whoa i've got news for you i i hate to say but that's how you sound Right. You need to get really comfortable with how you sound and you need to get really sort of ego detached from that self-assessment.

Starting point is 00:41:14 I feel like what you were saying earlier, as far as your perception refining over time, is also probably a result of recording yourself. And also, I find for myself that recording myself changes how I listen to myself in real time. It really is oral training. When you're recording to yourself, then you play again and you are listening as if with different ears. You're less focused on the physical motions and your ears are more guided towards the sound that you're projecting as opposed to being really distracted by the action that you're doing at the moment, if that makes sense. That is absolutely right on. I mean, I think we've all had the experience of going into a lesson, playing for a teacher. We do something and they point something out. And we're like, oh, oh, man, I didn't know I was doing that. Or I didn't know I was sounding that way. Or gosh, okay. and and incidentally just just as a little side comment um i got into recording all of my lessons i think that's hugely important for people to do i would record my lessons i would i would go through and actually generate transcripts of the lesson afterwards listening back to it many many times because that process of refocused awareness is so essential i mean basically your teacher is drawing your attention to something that you hadn't been previously aware of.

Starting point is 00:42:48 And once you're aware of it, now you can notice it in real time. You know, imagine you're walking down a busy city street, you know, New York or Chicago, and you're just kind of like zoning out, doing your thing, walking. And the person you're with is like, oh, hey, do you hear that jackhammer in the background? Or do you hear that, you know, baby crying up on the sixth floor of that apartment you're like oh i hadn't really been aware of that but now that i'm focused on oh yeah okay cool it's you know once you draw your attention to a thing now you can do something about it you're like oh yeah jackhammer right oh that's that's annoying i think as we get further up the block i'm gonna put in my earplugs or something or oh gosh you're right those 16th

Starting point is 00:43:35 notes were not even i wasn't really thinking about that but now i am and now i want to go back to play it again i don't have to be like cringing at the physical execution of this i can just be aware oh those need to be more even there's actually a big part of honors erickson's book peak where he talks about the way teachers can communicate these things and it and it sort of points to the way to try to set up a constructive self-dialogue so important and to unpack that i I mean, yeah, it really means like, okay, you're going to be spending a lot of time with yourself in the practice room. You're going to be listening to a lot of your own recordings. You're going to be doing all of this.

Starting point is 00:44:18 It really helps if you can do this with a frame of mind that is not like good, bad, but rather awareness-based, right? There's not a binary system of like, okay, that was good and that was bad, black and white. That's not really a thing. Because remember, like, this is a never-ending process. As a consequence of my audition preparation scheme, I had all these recordings of myself playing the same stuff. And at one point, you know, it started stretching back years. And it was incredibly instructive to be able to listen to that archive. Say something like the coda of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, first movement. It's a very commonly asked timpani excerpt. and you know i have probably 20 recordings of me playing that at different points in time and i set up this recorded archive for myself to establish a baseline and to be able to put a bunch of notes in there it was essentially my working laboratory notebook as a scientist

Starting point is 00:45:24 but it would have audio and it would often have video and i would put all of my sort of notes and living history of the excerpt and all the different feedback I'd gotten from people and musical decisions I'd made about it and times when I'd gotten on stage with my instruments and recorded it and did some sound checks. I'm like, oh, I like this mallet here. I like this mallet here. Just everything. Poured the whole thing into this recorded archive. And I could listen to it over time. And now I can hear it like my version from 2007. At some point, I recorded that. And I was like, you know what?

Starting point is 00:45:57 This represents my best of. This is my best of playing of this to date. I'm going to make a recording of this, and I'm going to save it. That's my reference point. And then sure enough, six months later, I go back to it, and it's better. And now I record a new one. And three months later, it's better. And two months after that, and I just kept doing this and doing this.

Starting point is 00:46:17 And what this shows is sort of the auditory version of this curve, this upward curve of continuous refinement, which is not linear. And in fact, you know, for any of the science or math minded people out there, it has this sort of like asymptotic approach to a point. And that point is what we would call perfection or however we want to conceive that. perfect is not a thing we never get there we just keep trying to incrementally get closer to it and in my own playing i could hear this and i could hear the development and the evolution over time and with that in mind i was like oh right thinking of this as good or bad is kind of arbitrary it doesn't really make sense i mean because at some point in time back in 2007 That was not only good, that was my best. And then comparing it to my version from three or four years later, I'm like, oh, yeah, that new version is obviously much better. Does that mean the old version is bad? Well, no, not really. That's kind of an arbitrary distinction.

Starting point is 00:47:30 um in certain terms if you're taking an audition there's a point at which you know the jury will vote that that's a thing um if you want to get out of the prelim round of an audition you know it's not going to be helping you any if you can't play with good time and rhythm and if you're out of tune like again those are some pretty basic objective things that that you need to work on but getting back to this idea of like a healthy dialogue with yourself framing it less in terms of good and bad and more in terms of awareness was another really important thing for me and and and it kept it from getting to that place that i think can happen with some people where it becomes this really self-shredding

Starting point is 00:48:18 negative kind of psychologically destructive cycle and you can start to develop this really um painful or sort of unhealthy relationship with the instrument and um and i just i i you know i really wanted to avoid that and the the focused awareness framing things in terms of let me be aware of this. Let me try to make this better, but not that's good. That's terrible. That's bad. That was pretty important for me. Thank you so much for sharing this. If I can take you now, actually back to what you mentioned a little bit earlier, because I heard and read about your method for learning repertoire for the opera. And I love how you make this such a, if I may call it this a holistic evolution. Can you describe this process a little

Starting point is 00:49:11 bit for the listeners so i think i think you're referring to this uh this one blog post where i was talking about how um i love you should sound different from now you die right is that is that the one you're referring to yes and and you know i was listening to many of your interviews and i just love how you really take the time to understand what's happening in the story and you develop the interpretation for so many people i think it's so easy to take on the score and learn the notes and play the crescendo where the crescendo is but i find that your approach to understanding what's behind this crescendo why is it there how does it fit the the action on stage that just brings things to as such um a way more elevated level and really helps

Starting point is 00:50:02 heighten the dramatic or comedic you know aspect of the story yeah oh totally i mean i think what's kind of interesting about this to me is that in a way opera timpani is a really extreme example of this um but i think it only serves to illustrate how you can kind of work backwards from that to understand that like oh yeah of course this is like an essential element of all music performance because it's all ultimately about communication you know i sometimes i sometimes tell people like uh you know when we're playing like it every everybody to some extent will i think experience performance anxiety and that is a thing that's a huge can of worms we don't necessarily have to get into that but i sometimes try to remind myself and remind

Starting point is 00:50:50 other people like you know this is not life or death we're just vibrating air at people we're just vibrating air at people so that they can feel a thing that's our job like when you reduce it to its most basic terms we vibrate air at people they feel a thing yes so if we're trying to make them feel a thing like yes the the aspect of emotive communication is just inherent it's absolutely fundamental to what we do and the thing is that opera makes it much more obvious in some ways right which is not to say that there's no emotional communication happening in bronze of course there is oh my god yes but nobody can claim to say this is the exact specific story of Brahms too, right? But I can definitely tell you the story of Tosca. I can tell you the

Starting point is 00:51:46 story of La Boheme. And in those instances, it really kind of clarified for me how when I'm learning repertoire, and if I want to be effective in my role, I really need to have a fairly complete understanding of what's going on dramatically. It's sort of a truism of orchestration for timpani and opera that it is often invoked in the moments of peak dramatic action, right? Somebody issues a curse, somebody declares their love, somebody finally stabs the villain, right? Almost always there's going to be some big timpani moment happening there. And, you know, I had been approaching performing this way when I was doing symphonic music before, but like I said, it became all the much more obvious in opera where I'm like, okay, I'm looking at like the page of a Puccini opera timpani part. Or I've got like, you know, a fortissimo roll on, say, an E-flat, E-natural, somewhere in there, and I need to play it.

Starting point is 00:53:03 Well, how am I going to play it? How does that need to sound? How should it sound? What can I communicate about what's going on? Because if I just sort of play it with no specific intention, I feel like that kind of misses the point of why we're doing any of this to begin with. And so in that one specific blog post, I was contrasting these sort of two, you know, almost polar opposite moments in Tosca versus La Boheme. In Tosca, this is a part where, you know, she finally stabs the villain, Scarpia. And in Bohème, it's this part where, you know, Marcello finally reunites with his ex-girlfriend, Musetta, and it's this sort of this warm embrace. And, you know, I think, like, those two moments really need to sound differently. That's not indicated on the page. There's really nothing about the notation there that tells us what's going on. And so, you know, I think we all have the obligation to really, as performers, plumb those depths. A lot of times you can understand what's going on. Just, you know, a well-written opera will have music that contextually conveys this.

Starting point is 00:54:29 We can hear certain moments in the way it's scored and be like, oh, yeah, I think something's happening here. Oh, it sounds menacing. Oh, it sounds relaxed. Oh, it sounds joyful, right? But, yeah, definitely the story and the drama, the libretto give us these extra tools to really refine and understand what's going on there. And then, like I said, ultimately vibrate that air at people so they can feel the thing. Yes, this is – yeah, this is so true. And thank you so much for saying it.

Starting point is 00:55:01 You know, for me, that's what real art history is about. So I'm really glad we talked about that because it's so easy. I play the violin. It's easy to play violin. I mean, no, it's not easy to play the violin, but what am I playing? Am I playing a passage with 16th notes on the violin, on this instrument, or am I trying to play music here? So I think that that's what you're showing with this story. And that's why I wanted to talk to you about it, because when you approach it with this intention and you go above and beyond the notes and understand this, the intention of the music, this is really when artistry happens.

Starting point is 00:55:43 So thank you so much. This is really incredible, valuable information you're giving us today. Oh, cool. I'm glad. And I mean, just to, you know, I guess to tie it back quickly to one of the other things we were talking about, it's, you know, the example I'm talking about is for, you know, performing these operas at the Met. But ultimately, you know, in auditioning, this is really where it's at. I think the biggest compliment you can get having played an audition is from somebody who says, you know, like the way you played that, I really heard the orchestra. I really could hear the rest of the parts going on.

Starting point is 00:56:17 And to me, what that means is that you have committed a level of, you know, refinement to that and made all of these musical decisions with some, you know, thought and intelligence and musical understanding and stylistic understanding and dramatic contextual understanding. That's what enables people to hear that. Yes. And, you know, again, assuming that all of the, you know, fundamentals are in good shape, the time, rhythm, intonation, clarity, all this other stuff, it's those decisions and the way you play it then that that is what really communicates at the end of the day, artistry. Like you said, that's, that's the most important thing. And that's what, you know, really audition committees are listening for. Absolutely. I agree 100%. Jason, how about a round of rapid fire questions before we wrap up our discussion? Sure. So for the people who are dreaming of a career that resemble yours, can you talk to us a little bit about what your life looks like?

Starting point is 00:57:19 Yeah. Life as a musician in the Met Orchestra is really unique. It is not like a lot of other symphonic orchestras. And one simple reason for that is that we have a schedule that is really grueling between September and June, basically, when the opera season is. We're doing seven performances a week of four different operas at any given time with usually at least another two, three, sometimes four operas in rehearsal. And so it's not unusual that, you know, on my plate in any given week, I can have two to three different operas that I'm playing and another two to three that I'm rehearsing. And just that amount of musical material to keep straight in my head, it's exhausting. And it, you know, it's, um, I guess by contrast, a lot of symphonic works programs are sort of more linear. You know, you have, all right, this week we're doing Mahler and a Beethoven concerto and, and, you know, the Rossini overture. And that's all we're focusing on this week. Um, we have this much more sort of schizophrenic existence where it's Bellini in the morning, Strauss at night, you know, Wagner the next morning and Puccini the next evening. And, and you're just sort of like going through all of it. Um, the other consequence of that is because we're doing all of these shows, uh, we have

Starting point is 00:58:45 essentially a double orchestra and we will be alternating and kind of rotating in and out on a lot of these things. And so no one week looks like the next. I may have a week where I have rehearsals every morning and then, you know, three evening shows during the week and playing a Saturday matinee. the next week it might be two different rehearsals and then all of the you know performances clustered at the end of the week or vice versa and so it's it's a constantly it's sort of the feeling of constantly being in flux both with time and with all of the different material you're learning and

Starting point is 00:59:22 for which you need to be responsible you know i guess related to that is that you know as instrumental musicians we get primarily exposed to symphonic music when we're training when we're in school when we're growing up, I certainly did not have deep exposure to opera before the Met. And part of that is that there are just fewer opera companies out there. So the performing opportunities we have as musicians, most of the time, if we're doing something freelance, it's going to be in a symphonic orchestra. Well, that means that basically everybody that gets a job with the Met Orchestra is learning a lot of this repertoire for the very first time. And that's, it's pretty crazy when you think about it, because, you know, imagine somebody winning a job in the Chicago Symphony, but they have never once played any of the Brahms symphonies, Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, any of this stuff, right? And then they win the job. And in that next season, they're doing all of them. They're doing the entire Beethoven symphony cycle, all nine Mahler symphonies, all the Sibelius symphonies, all this stuff, right?

Starting point is 01:00:25 it's an incredible amount of new repertoire to learn all at once and so it's going to be a long summer oh man absolutely and the first i mean this is a pretty universal experience for anyone that joins our orchestra the first couple years are just super intense because you have all of this new stuff to learn really quickly and get to a level where you can perform it confidently with this great orchestra and um yeah that is that is tough it is stressful um you know i now at the point of my sixth season it's it's really i like now coming back to a lot of this repertory that i have played because i feel like you know just like i was talking about before the process never ends you know i've played boem probably 40 times i'd still like my 41st to be a little better

Starting point is 01:01:19 And every time I'm sitting there being like, okay, like that was pretty good. But I could do this other thing like a little more effectively, I think. Let me work on that for next time. Yeah, that's sort of a taste of life at the Met. How about a performance that stayed with you throughout the years? that's always tough um i'll tell you what i'll pick a couple i'll say last season we did um wagner's opera parsifal with our new music director yannick nizet again that was um basically transcendental it's just absolutely astonishing music um the cast was incredible it's a great production he's phenomenal to work with as a as a music director and just as a conductor on the podium. Um, I knew as we were doing it, that like, okay, yeah, this is going to be like a life highlight. I'm going to remember this for a long time. Um, another one of those

Starting point is 01:02:14 actually happened for me when I was in the civic orchestra in Chicago, we did Shostakovich 11th symphony and it, you know, it's a huge timpani part. Um, it, the, the orchestra was sounding particularly great that year. Uh, you know, I had a bunch of family and friends that came to the concert. It was just incredibly exciting. It's a kind of profound, amazing symphony. And that one has definitely stuck with me too. That sounds great. And what a great piece too. What skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments? I think I will probably say a similar thing that listeners will have heard from a lot of people, which is having a well-rounded skill set is just essential for navigating a

Starting point is 01:03:08 rapidly changing world. Excellent communication skills. I mean, it's a trope at this point. It's such a tired thing for people to say, but it's true. I mean, just being able to craft a good email, being a good writer, that is never going to go away as an important skill. And, you know, these days having a certain degree of tech savvy, you know, being, you know, knowing your way around the laptop and the apps and the different, you know, programs and everything, just there's so much that as musicians now we can do to leverage technology to our benefit in this process of deliberate practice, right? you know self-recording and and video and you know these kinds of archives that i constructed for myself um it's it's not difficult none of this you need a computer science degree for or anything far from it um but just having a basic facility there is going to let you take advantage of these tools i often think about like can you imagine like our teachers or even their teachers

Starting point is 01:04:15 like the generations back in the in the 70s and 80s that could look at what we have now in terms of a website imslp that has basically all of the parts and scores for everything digitized you have youtube mp3s you have spotify all of the recordings and you have the ability to record yourself with high quality microphones good gear with a device that costs like 250 dollars and digital storage space that is essentially free at this point i mean terabytes worth of storage that will cost you know dollars a month i just i think about like some of the some of the icons from from the you know timpani and percussion world back in the 60s they would just god they would kill for this technology how you can leverage that to be able to learn and grow and and you know

Starting point is 01:05:07 evolve your own playing and you know so yeah have having a basic facility with those kinds of things I think is really essential just, you know, in general life, but also specifically as practicing musicians. You know, I've thought about this too. And I think that these teachers would say probably two things. First of all, how do you find time to practice? And second of all, why don't you sound better? Well, it's funny. I actually, I was, I was compelled to write a specific blog post about that exact thing because this technology of course can be a double-edged sword. I always tell my students, make sure your phone can be a great tool. You can have a tuner on there, a metronome. You can have all this other stuff, but put it in airplane mode when

Starting point is 01:05:49 you're practicing because it is just impossible to focus and remain concentrating on what you're doing in the practice room. If you are getting texts and calls and status update alerts and all this other stuff, you're done. You're not actually getting anything productive done at that point. Jason, do you have a favorite book that you would recommend to our listeners? Well, you know, I've already mentioned two and I'll just reiterate them. The first one, the one that John Tafoya recommended for me was Talent is Overrated by an author named Jeffrey Colvin. And he, you know, he's one of those writers that was sort of popularizing research that he was coming across at the time. And a lot of that was the research of Anders Ericsson.

Starting point is 01:06:30 And then Erickson himself, back in 2016, wrote his book, Peak, which has a lot of the same concepts and then goes into even more depth and sophistication on it. Those are the two books I tell my students to read all the time. They're sitting on my shelf right next to my head right now. So I totally agree with your pick. What's the best advice you've ever received that you would like to pass on? Well, you know, that's interesting. It, when I think about, again, that, that inflection point was when, you know, my teacher, John Tafoya said, check out this book. I think it would really resonate with you.

Starting point is 01:07:10 Like the way you work, kind of the, your science brain in this, I think it could really latch onto that. That was huge. I mean, I, there's of course, lots of great musical advice and things about, you know, our careers that our teachers passed down to us. But that one recommendation radically changed my thinking about all of this. And, you know, not just the philosophy I was going about this with, but really the mechanisms of how I was practicing. Yeah, that's a must read for everybody. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:45 How about a quick actionable tip that listeners can implement today in their musical lives? Well, you know, I mentioned this a few times already, but, you know, if you don't already have a good digital recorder, get one, just do it like bite the bullet. Um, I like the, the zoom H4N it's excellent. It's portable. It's really easy to use, you know, basically having one of those with you in the practice room every day and, you know, committing to at least recording something, developing, you know, evidence and data for your practicing something that you can refer back to as a daily habit, I think is just so important. Well, you heard the man, people.

Starting point is 01:08:33 Do it. Jason, I can't thank you enough for this gift of your time and insight. And I hope that everyone listening goes to your website right now. Read all of your articles. I think that if you're serious about music making, you need to read all of Jason's article. And again, I truly appreciate you being here today. Oh, thank you so much. This was a real pleasure.

Starting point is 01:09:06 Thank you guys so much for listening. I had such a great time talking with Jason and I feel motivated to go even deeper in my practice and refine my process. You can find the show notes for this episode as well as resources on mindful practice at mindoverfinger.com. and you can visit jasonhaheim.com for his articles on deliberate practice and to find information about his upcoming performances and his various teaching programs.

Starting point is 01:09:34 I would love to connect with you, so join the conversation on social media. Let me know what inspires you, what specific questions you have about mindful practice and what other topics and guests you would like to hear about in future episodes. I am mindoverfinger on all platforms. If you're looking for a community of mindful practice enthusiasts, join the Mind Over Finger tribe at facebook.com slash groups slash Mind Over Finger tribe. There you will find inspiration, motivation, and support as well as information and discussion on how to take your practice to the next level and enjoy the process. Next week, I'll be talking to composer Jim Stevenson about taking chances on your dreams and living a life writing music in 2018.

Starting point is 01:10:21 This is a fun one and I can't wait to send it your way. If you have the chance, please take a minute to head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review. It's very much appreciated. Again, thank you and à bientôt. Thank you.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 012 Jason Haaheim: The Science, Power, and Joys of Deliberate Practice

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