The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 021 Dr. Immanuel Abraham: How Determination & Dedicated Work Lead to Success

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 21. 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. I hope you're having a wonderful week so far. Before we launch in the episode, I want to take a minute to give a huge shout out to my wonderful producer, Bella Kelly, who works so hard to make me and my guests sound our very best. This podcast would not be possible without her. And I'm so grateful that she's part of the team. So thank you, Bella. Last week,

Starting point is 00:00:53 I spoke with pianist David Jalbert about finding yourself as an artist, the importance of confidence in our progress and about some tips on how to learn and memorize music. And today I speak with Dr. Emmanuel Abraham, violinist, composer, and creator of Facebook's most popular bowed string forum, The Violin Guild, which comprises over 30,000 members worldwide. Emmanuel graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona with degrees in violin performance, and he has earned numerous awards and recognitions. In addition to this, he is a sought-after composer, and his most recent commissions have included complete scores for theatrical works, string quartets, and the Abraham 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, which have premiered

Starting point is 00:01:46 in three countries. Emmanuel has performed across the world and has been featured on CBS Detroit, BuzzFeed and Fiddler Men's exclusive blog series Music is for Everyone. In this fascinating conversation Emmanuel talks to us about his unorthodox path to a professional career and all things mindful and efficient practice. He also talks about the importance of learning to compose in enhancing your performance on your instrument. I find his story very compelling and I know for a fact that Emmanuel's passion and incredible dedication for his art will inspire and motivate you. Let's go to the show.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Emmanuel, Abraham, so great to have you on the show today. Thank you for having me. I'm really, really grateful. Really grateful to be on the show. grateful to talk to you um love your program everything that you've had on it i i learned from it um so thank you for that and i'm honored to be a guest ah emmanuel i first heard about you after joining the violent guild's facebook group which you run and i've loved following your activities ever since and i'm having a lot of fun as a member of this group i'm excited that we're

Starting point is 00:03:12 going to get to talk about efficient practice. So let's get right to it. But before, I'd like us to start with knowing more about you. So can you please tell us about you and your musical journey and how you got to where you are and how your artistic path has unfolded? Sure. I'll start with my inspiration, what made me want to play the violin in the first place. I had what most, pretty much everyone in the classical world considers a late start. I started my musical studies at the age of 14. And so I didn't play violin or anything else before that. I started at 14 and I knew immediately that this is what I wanted to do with my life. And I, you know, I didn't really, I had no idea what I was getting into, but my, I knew that this was something that I enjoyed.

Starting point is 00:04:15 And the inspiration for violin in particular came from a version of Sesame Street. So Sesame Street has some spinoff versions in other countries where they integrate language and cultural learning. uh like instead of just having your abcs and your one two threes and some basic words and grammar if they go to say mexico there's a version of sesame street there where people can learn spanish and english side by side uh as a being raised as a jew i watched a version of sesame street called shalom sesame and it just so happens that in Tel Aviv, Israel. Israel's second most populous city I believe. There's a town called Tel Aviv

Starting point is 00:05:03 and in Tel Aviv there's a street called in Hebrew that means Sesame Street. Now Tel Aviv itself is also the hometown of the one and only Itzhak Perlman. So Itzhak Perlman had been a regular guest on this show. And of course, you know, being Perlman, he made the violin look cool and easy, and only one of which turned out to be correct in the end. It's very cool. And so I started asking to play the violin from a relatively young age, but I grew up as

Starting point is 00:05:48 one of 12 siblings and most of my family was crammed in a small two-bedroom apartment so there's not really practice space or even space to hear yourself think but I kept asking to play the violin and when I was 14 there was an ad in a newspaper offering a free violin lesson at the Merritt School of Music in Chicago and they'd let you borrow a violin for a few weeks and so you know I begged to do that I went studied I got my first lesson there and after a short while I worked really hard at it and convinced my folks to invest in allowing me to continue to study music and so shortly after that I needed to get an instrument and my first violin that I owned came from the Salvation Army. It was in a pillowcase. I had three strings. And I didn't

Starting point is 00:06:48 know enough about the violin to know a good violin from a bad violin. It was just a violin. And so that was one of the challenges that was faced was the age I had started and the monetary means of my family. The money just didn't allow me to start beginning to study music until I was 14. And after a year, year and a half, I was already saying, I have to do this for the rest of my life. This is just the best thing ever. And everything I was getting out of it, which I'll get into maybe later in the show, was just life-changing for me on a minutely basis. Even my best and closest teachers were saying, you're moving at a very quick pace, but You know, everything you need to know about music at large to go for a degree in music and for violin performance in particular, four years isn't really enough time to prepare for that.

Starting point is 00:07:50 And so this was kind of a constant jab that I was getting that was propelling me forward was the fear of not being able to continue this as my life and passion for the rest of my life. and so I was I was getting up before uh before school you know hours before school started to practice uh I'd get my hours in during high school I skipped every single lunch I don't remember getting lunch once during uh during high school um and I used all that time to practice I also lost a lot of weight because I wasn't eating lunch yeah I came to high school pretty pudgy and but I lost that. I'm skipping lunch for four years. And, and after, after school, my, I was always the last one in the orchestra room practicing more.

Starting point is 00:08:48 And my, the orchestra director actually gave me the keys to the orchestra room because I was the first one there in the mornings and the last one to leave. And he knew he could rely on me to have the doors unlocked and open every day. And so that that continued throughout high school. And there were a lot of programs and things that I joined in the meantime. But I'd like to move on to your other questions. But that was the impetus for what has started me with music and a bit of the motivation.

Starting point is 00:09:21 You know, it's really incredible. What a wonderful story. So inspiring of defying the odds and show what true determination can do. Really remarkable. And you mentioned the Merritt School of Music and I live in Chicago and I have often the opportunity to go there for, you know, various events. And I believe in their mission so much. This is such a truly incredible organization that has fostered talent of so many young kids that went on to become a professional. But even those who did not become professional musicians, it impacted their lives in so many ways, offering them a nurturing environment and stimulation and surroundings with faculty that really nurtures their gifts and their personalities. And I really wish that we saw more organizations like the Merit School everywhere. Absolutely. Let's continue this story because it's so fascinating. So you're there and, you know, I think that any teacher would have told you at 14, forget it.

Starting point is 00:10:34 There's no way you'll ever become a professional musician, especially playing the violin. There's this preconception that if you are not proficient by the time you're seven years old, you will just never make it. But so you're there. And how did that happen for you to get into college? And tell us a little bit about your college journey. Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, that was the number one, like I said, the jab in the back. There's the strong and very popular and somewhat justified but false idea in classical music

Starting point is 00:11:12 that if you, essentially, if you don't start as a fetus, you've missed the boat. You know, I was always trying to prove this wrong. And you're right, you know, a lot of the instructors, people who had watched me were still saying, you know, this is just not enough time. Now, a lot of people who didn't know how long I'd been playing, you know, even after two years were saying, you know, yeah, go for it. But the people who knew that it had only been two years of study at that point were just saying, no way. Even at the Merritt School of Music, when I had first gone there, they had the rule that the best thing about the Merritt School is their tuition-free conservatory program, in my opinion. That's just a lifesaver, especially for the underprivileged and underrepresented communities, which are many in Chicago. You know, it allows an opportunity to study music with some of the best instructors in the city.

Starting point is 00:12:17 And if you put the work in, it's tuition free. Being involved in a tuition free conservatory and I became concertmaster of their symphony after it was my third year. And I was second in their concerto competition the same year. But at that point, I had also done so many other things. My goals were in music. I just took it all in wherever possible. So a huge program that helped me and that I have a decade long history with had been the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lake, Michigan. And I played in a lot of youth symphonies throughout Chicago, you know, the Oak Park Symphony, River Forest Symphony, Symphony from the Shorewood Academy, Chicago Cervantes. By my junior year, I'd gotten into the Chicago Youth Symphony.

Starting point is 00:13:14 With that ensemble, I played under Alan Tinkham then, but we had the CYMI that same year. And so I also got the opportunity to play and perform at Symphony Center under Gustavo Dudamel. Wow. And these were all programs where, you know, it just seemed as long as I was putting in as many hours as felt humanly possible to put in on the violin, doors were opening that would never have opened any other way. You know, when I was growing up, college wasn't a discussion. Again, I was one of 12 siblings, and most of my family was in a two-bedroom apartment. This wasn't a discussion, but through Blue Lake, I joined their Masterworks Orchestra my first year. That was where I played my first Tchaikovsky symphony.

Starting point is 00:14:04 I remember it was Tchaikovsky's Sixth, and I played first violin for that. There was a lot of new things. I remember I had good interactions at the camp, loved everyone at the camp that I met. but uh i skipped as many social events as possible to actually learn my part and uh there were positions and things that were required in the excerpts that i still had never uh encountered before at that point the next year though i had auditioned for the international youth symphony and that's their a group that tours europe for the better part of two months and then they come back to the u.s and have a mini homecoming tour and the program then was uh roughly it was

Starting point is 00:14:50 expensive and my whole family uh extended family and all came together and put the money together for me to go on this first tour while i was on tour uh and we played a lot of repertoire type type four uh pictures at an exhibition and we had overture to candida's uh encore other things on program and but they had the deal that if you if you became concert master in that ensemble you would tour for free and for me that chair seemed further away than the orion constellation but i knew that if there was any chance any chance of going back because this experience you know it's my first time outside the country i dreamed of traveling uh but again you know the the price of plane tickets and all that it just seemed another impossibility um to be able to

Starting point is 00:15:44 travel again but it was so life-changing uh stayed with host families rather than just like sitting in motels and just learned so much about the culture tried new foods um got immersed with different languages the tourists went through uh the first year was austria france germany i think we had one stop in Denmark also. Absolutely life-changing. So I practiced so much that year. The excerpts that we had, you know, musical literacy was a huge thing to hurdle to jump in addition to the violin technique itself. And I used to take my music and turn it upside down, read it backwards, put it on its side, practice reading it that way. I did everything possible with the music. I play notes from the end to the beginning. I think you commented on a post I made

Starting point is 00:16:38 about doing that not too long ago with the presto from Bach's first solo sonata, BWV 1001, how it still sounds good playing it completely backwards. And so I learned to read the music. I did that with the excerpts this way. And so I actually memorized all of my excerpts. And I was so confident by the time of the audition I went in without the music and it wasn't uh it wasn't deliberate I I just you know I'd been working on it so long without the music that I felt super comfortable with it now there hadn't been um high schoolers um uh in that seat um for uh except you know when the program first started I believe they may have but um And the seat had usually been held by a college student or a college graduate. And at the time that I did achieve first chair the next summer, I think I left off talking about the practice, the type of practice I had with those excerpts.

Starting point is 00:17:49 Literally learning them backwards. Playing long passages with starting the notes from the far right and reading them going left. Anything to feel absolutely comfortable with the excerpt, any accident, blindfolded practice, you name it. got super super creative with ways to improve and ways to become a better player and so I got this chair and I held that chair in the orchestra for four consecutive years into college alongside that I participated in I'd been concert manager of the Merritt Symphony Orchestra uh first violin the chicago uh cervantes uh sinfonietta um and uh i played first violin the symphony of oak park and river forest another wonderful wonderful experience and all of this uh and i was still getting up and practicing before school still skipping every lunch um i skipped both of my proms um to to practice uh i skipped my own uh birthday parties because

Starting point is 00:19:12 you're saying okay we're gonna have a party for you and i'm saying you know i've got this thing coming up tomorrow i really need to practice for that can we just like put the birthday thing off till next week or just give me the presents now and i hope one of them's from rosin um and you know at this point i know that numbers are irrelevant it's all about the quality of practice too i mean numbers are not completely irrelevant but just to give us a rough idea how many hours a day do you say you would you were practicing at that time oh um six would be a good estimate and wow the um and i and that's not a that's not at all uh a brag or a boast of any kind um i was not an efficient smart uh practicer at that point i can honestly say that um i got

Starting point is 00:20:05 results but my um uh i hadn't really realized the extent to which quality over quantity applies I just knew what seemed to be working and I had these opportunities to travel literally tour Europe every summer for five summers in a row the summer after that I went to I got an invite to tour in Spain and Laredo Mar in Barcelona but I started realizing that to play not only with that rate of output but also certain levels of repertoire I needed to have a more um efficient uh practice regime and i've heard you speak often about mindful practice and if i can talk about mindful practice for a moment uh is that okay with you oh absolutely so i i really appreciate that you've uh devoted time on your social media and

Starting point is 00:21:10 episodes to mindful practice and you've asked people what is mindful practice what does it look like in the practice room and mindful practices i mean it's a term that's used a lot in pedagogy and i've found many to equate mindful practice with focused practice and i think that's error mindful and focused are two totally different adjectives in this case mindful practice carries the directive of being aware focused more carries the directive of being undistracted and you can do a lot of things good and not so good for your playing while being undistracted from it um so it really doesn't equate with being uh focused uh by itself that's an excellent point thank you uh you i mean you could be having a practice that's not productive at all and remain

Starting point is 00:22:17 unfortunately completely undistracted uh i call that zombie mode and you're you're um you probably have a more elegant term for it but that's what i'm that's what it feels like because i think we've all done that a bit um and i call it zombie mode because uh going through your kratzer and your road and daunt etudes or especially something more potentially hypnotizing like wolf art opus 45 or septic um opus one and two um with bad posture or playing out of tune or not ever playing it with actual tempo um a lot of us do our paganini work that way just because we stop at you know every other note um i think we've all engaged in that somewhat um the easiest mistake for a musician to make in my opinion and experience um is it's so easy to

Starting point is 00:23:16 practice and get worse i think this is really important to to realize uh practice absolutely does not make perfect and there's this trendy edit to that where they say okay only perfect practice makes perfect and that's also not true uh why is it untrue because there's no such thing as perfect practice that the very concept uh and the words are oxymoronic if we had perfect practice we would never have to practice you know in the first place um it's the Practice is the process of our imperfections and going through those processes allows us to temper them and to make them smaller. No one has ever played anything perfectly with a mathematical absolute definition of the word perfect. Um, and there are small things. I think every recording that's ever made of any piece, the artist would have something that they would have changed or made slightly different or even very different in that recording. So that the concept of perfect practice, uh, is entirely oxymoronic in my opinion.

Starting point is 00:24:41 and we've all had what seemed like great practice days then awake the next day and we feel like we took the whole week off um it's like what happened you know who uh who messed me up in my sleep i'm never going to go to sleep again if that happens and so mindful practice is instead you of just being merely undistracted mindful practice is being aware aware of those things both internal and external to us especially habits that stymie our productive process of our imperfections um and so you know not going through things hypnotically um it's very easy to do with scales and etudes and I've fallen into that you know I've had six hour practice runs when I especially when I was younger and just starting out

Starting point is 00:25:45 where I was trying to play four octave scales in tune which after a couple of years was very you know I'd be very fortunate if the first octave were in tune um and uh but i was going through these and really just struggling to to get it and i put all this time in in six hours and i think i would have gotten more out of a half an hour doing it at a much slower tempo uh realizing what was in tune and out of tune you know intonation as a string players in my opinion is our number one uh what we work on the most technique wise and uh by far it's one of very few uh instruments left um in western music that doesn't have anything marked um there's no button we can press or or key to push down that guarantees the right pitch and

Starting point is 00:26:50 just mathematically speaking we never play this exact same pitch twice and it's kind of like the you imagine a piano if the keys are all just one piece of wood

Starting point is 00:27:08 and each key is a different size and then you still have to play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto with the keys in that kind of orientation and that's what we get with a violin you know after eighth or ninth position a minor second is literally smaller than the space of the tip of our finger and so we've got all these things

Starting point is 00:27:34 to deal with and I you know and I hadn't really stopped to think about you know the the finger board being like the solar system in reverse everything getting closer and closer together as we go up um i was just more oriented on getting through the thing and that was my goal and i'd go at that for six hours so i i it wasn't mindful it was extremely focused extremely focused and it was not mindful at all i was not aware of what was actually happening i was aware of the input and not really aware of the actual output and i had many days of practicing for six hours uh and feeling worse the next day right and i feel like for practice to be efficient i think that the intention the focus and the awareness they need to be locked on to the right target

Starting point is 00:28:25 exactly exactly and i can talk about a recording that really that changed you know i've heard teachers say practice slower you need to practice slower you need to lighten up you need to not have all this pressure on the violin I heard violinists who you know heavy Israeli players like Pinka Zuckerman who everything they they did sounded just so rich and toneful and I wanted to mimic that and so I was putting a lot of muscle work into it and not knowing that you know the violin is really you want the the fewest muscles engaged possible at all times. And when did that change for you? That changed when I had an audition at the, I went to the University of Michigan for undergrad and grad school. There was a year that the symphony was going to

Starting point is 00:29:21 Carnegie Hall and I wanted to be in the ensemble then. They had two ensembles, the Philharmonic and symphony at the school. Symphony was the higher level ensemble and I had two years in philharmonic and so i really wanted to get into symphony this term and the excerpt that was bugging me uh is the popular schumann scherzo um um and i i got it up to tempo i memorized it um i went through my old uh processes of being extremely focused not mindful um and i was frustrated because i felt like i had the technique i wasn't getting uh tired but it just wasn't it wasn't perfectly in tune um the articulations weren't perfectly even um the tone and dynamics weren't always deliberate for every note and i just i got very frustrated because at the level

Starting point is 00:30:28 of that university, the players there, I knew that other people were achieving what I was having trouble with. And I took a period, it was the longest period I had gone without playing at that point. It was a couple of weeks. It was over the summer. And because I was just, I felt depressed. I couldn't figure out what needed to change. And I listened that summer to Midori's 1990 Carnegie Hall debut, particularly the tenth track on the CD, I remember it very well, The Last Rose of Summer Variation, and I was just absolutely blown away by this. Now in high school I had the opportunity to perform a Valdi duo with Midori at the Merritt School of Music. It was

Starting point is 00:31:20 another wonderful opportunity they had provided um and i so i met her and i knew that she was physically small in stature now i'm i'm six two um i have large hands uh her hand can almost fit in the palm of my hand and she was playing this you know this this repertoire it's you know even on the first page you're sustaining tenths while using two of your fingers to play pitched left hand pizzicati on the g and d strings and i i was listening to this recording i was just blown away that someone with a hand that i knew was you know physically weaker than my hand that was so much smaller uh whose arms were so much smaller i just couldn't gather how a how it was possible in the first place and b how this was possible for her and so i thought it can't be in the muscles it

Starting point is 00:32:15 can't be trying to force things to happen she's extremely there's something else going on here and something that I really don't have any idea about so I kept thinking about this recording and after a while I found a video on YouTube and I just I remember zooming in I even took like screenshots and zoomed in just to look at her fingers and see what what's going on like how as possible and what i noticed is that first it looked easy when she did it second she wasn't exerting any force anywhere where it wasn't absolutely necessary and so i did some reading and i found some things from galamian where it's saying you know the the maximum amount of pressure you need on the fingerboard was only enough to stop the vibration from happening on the other

Starting point is 00:33:06 side of the string any more than that is wasted energy wasted effort and it slows your hand down which slows down everything you want to do with your hand it's a handicap in that way and it was just a huge revelation to me and so i started practicing to the other extreme of essentially dropping my bow and uh just to practice playing lightly i put a blanket down in a practice room at the music school and just because I want to work on playing lightly so lightly that if I drop my bow it wouldn't you know mess up my bow and my left hand posture too because at that point I you know I'd only been playing five five and a half years and I'd already had my fingerboard panned twice and panning is where

Starting point is 00:33:56 you've played so much that you've worn grooves into the fingerboard now someone with good better technique than I wouldn't have probably wouldn't have ever needed to have a fingerboard hand and I'd already gone through that twice and you know wearing grooves in the fingerboard affects intonation too because your string goes down a tenth of a centimeter farther and brings the pitch sharp and so I just started playing extremely lightly I use the business card trick where if your finger is down light enough you can keep your finger at the same place on the string with enough pressure to retain the pitch while sliding a business card under your finger,

Starting point is 00:34:34 under the string. Things to discover how lightly I could play while it worked. And immediately what I noticed is that my endurance just doubled because I'm using less than half the muscles that I had been using. And so that was really the changing point. The recording that changed

Starting point is 00:34:56 what I was able to do on the violin And if that if I hadn't had that revelation, grad school definitely wouldn't have happened. I definitely wouldn't be holding a doctorate in violin performance today. Which you just got recently, by the way. Congratulations. Oh, thank you. Yeah, the graduation was less than 17 hours ago. You know, there's so many, so many things I love in your story.

Starting point is 00:35:24 I always find it so interesting to hear about someone's path because I feel like there's so much that can be learned and so many lessons that can be extracted from taking a look at what helps someone get where they are. And I think it is so incredible to hear you talk about how through your own curiosity and searching for answers, you really were able to make it achievable. You know, I feel that sometimes we're all maybe guilty of this. We struggle with something and we wait for answers from someone else. But you really show what can happen when we take ownership of our knowledge and our experience and really search for ourself. And it's one of the big concepts I try to incorporate in my own practice and probably forget about it too often. But also my teaching is this concept of beginner's mind, of remaining curious and monitoring the basics, remaining, I like the word insatiably curious, which sounds a little bit like what you were about figuring out the issues in the playing. Um, but, you know, it takes a village for sure. And you mentioned the merit school and CYSO and your family coming together and those many opportunities that you were offered. But it also takes someone who's driven and puts in the effort and pushes past the obstacles.

Starting point is 00:36:58 And I feel like that story you told us is so important for people to hear that you search for answer and you go in the methodical way to find the answers and there's no limit to what you can accomplish. Absolutely, absolutely true. And I hope that I've lived up to that, what you've just said. um it's um it's it's incredibly important and remaining curious um i think there's a huge difference between just uh asking questions and asking questions while being curious and curious at least uh i haven't looked it up probably ever but it's not just a search for an answer but it's desire to have it almost by any, you know, any means necessary. Um, and, and that, and like you said, the, the childlike curiosity, I think, and I always, um, I believe the better that you get

Starting point is 00:38:08 at something, it's almost the worst you feel. Um, and not, you know, just in an introspectively way, because you become it's like it's like the sciences you know the you get an answer to something and it reveals more questions we you know we discovered quantum physics you know around the early 20th century and all of a sudden all of our you know general relativity um and quantum mechanics are incompatible but they both exist in the universe and at the theorized beginning of the universe they had to coexist and so it brought about even more questions so you know for every question that's answered you get five more questions about that answer that's so true so it's perpetual but i think you know at the end you know whenever you know if there even is an

Starting point is 00:39:04 ending point you know my desire isn't to have to feel like i have more answers my desire is to feel like i have more questions the pursuit of the the answer is something to of answers is the thing to embrace and uh the pursuit of the answer is that's what practice is in my opinion sometimes i think a lot of a lot of our questions the the answer to them is just to pursue the answer itself yes and you don't actually get an objective answer because especially in the arts answers are so many answers aren't objective and they're entirely subjective um so you can say someone has an issue with fourth finger trills for example you give them i forgot which one it was i think it's like crate serve 17 i know there's two there's two versions of crates or never mind

Starting point is 00:39:59 there's the one that he revised and uh it has 40 uh 40 42 etudes rather than 40 but anyway there's a crater etude you might give that to someone for fourth finger trills and the real issue for that individual isn't their fourth finger muscle that that that that the etude works on it might be their posture with the left hand you know some people have this thing where they fan out their left hand away from the fingerboard as the hand approaches the pinky finger. And so reaching the G string with four rather than going from the top down is almost like a reach around. And if you're reaching around and trying to trill with anything at the same time, I mean, just thinking about it, um, almost seems silly that that'll never work. Uh, speaking

Starting point is 00:40:50 from experience you know in the process of finding that out is uh that's that's your job you know a teacher is is a guide but they guide you to finding your own answers and i think those are the best teachers well it's like you say to that the pursuit of the answer is where you learn because someone could tell you to use less pressure but how do you learn to use less pressure unless you're really determined to figure out how it works for yourself exactly exactly um and there's and of course there's so many ways to to apply more pressure i just had this discussion with a student uh less than an hour ago about the application of pressure where to apply from you might want to take some of the pressure off that you're applying

Starting point is 00:41:40 subconsciously from your shoulder and put it into your index finger and um and every bow stroke and every bow direction will have a different set of muscles that engages for that pressure and no two just like fingerprints no two fingerprints are the same no two arms are the same and so this one size fits all approach really doesn't work we've seen that in the american education system as well standard curriculum being uh issued out it's been a failure in um uh the american education system because it's that one size fits all approach yes um that doesn't work and you know one thing that i find is interesting about your story is because you started so late and had to catch up i find that it gave you a completely different perspective you had more

Starting point is 00:42:37 maturity at that stage but also you had the determination to look for these answers that we've been talking about but to approach the problem solving completely differently i think that when you start young the muscle memory is developed you know the habits are assimilated really early on and then you end up when you start an instrument a little bit later you end up having to really put more intellectual um how can i say have a much more intellectual approach to how to incorporate all of these elements in your playing. How does that look for you now? Let's say, for example, you have to work

Starting point is 00:43:18 on a very difficult passage in a new piece. What does that look like? You look at this passage and you're trying to learn it. Well, I completely agree with what you said about if there is an upside to a late start with starting music, starting a difficult excerpt, there's nothing i uh i can take for granted on the page so to speak most of my music colleagues in fact all of them that i'm aware of and i've talked about this with them a lot cannot remember

Starting point is 00:43:51 a point where they could not read music at all a lot of them can't remember a point where they didn't know where the g string was or how to reach it with the bow these are still fresh in my mind because they were with well within the last uh 14 or 15 years incredible i started this as a teenager so i i remember looking at a page of music and not knowing what anything on the page said not knowing what it meant i remember all of this and so the process of while the music is expressive to me it's something i hope to talk about later the process is still very cerebral and everything is very deliberate still one of my curiosities at this point is plato spoke about four levels of learning the first is unconscious incompetence where you're not good at something

Starting point is 00:44:47 and you're so not good at it you don't you're not even aware that you're not good at it the next level is conscious incompetence where you're aware that you're incompetent or not great at a thing the next level where i spend a lot of my time is probably the better moments of my time is conscious competence where you're good at a thing but you have to be conscious and it's a conscious effort to be decent at that thing or that technique or that run or that passage and he said the highest level um of learning is uh unconscious competence where you can be good at something and not really have to think about it so tuning is something that we still think about but we might be able to hit third finger on a d hundreds of times in a row perfectly in tune um and that's kind of as

Starting point is 00:45:45 far as the violin can go the level of unconscious competence my curia and i see a lot of child prodigies especially online who are literally seven eight nine years old uh and playing through the sfor version of paganini's first concerto which is an even harder version than paganini's actual his manuscript even kreisler rewrote paganini's uh first concerto into a one movement concerto to make it playable because he was asked to play it and he said this is too much but my curiosity is to see if someone can start as a teenager and achieve unconscious competence the fourth level of Plato's learning table at this point unconscious competence is still something I'm striving for but like I said I'm curious about it I think the pursuit of that

Starting point is 00:46:37 curiosity is more important and more gainful than actually whether it's reached or not that is so good that is so good and i love what you say about not taking anything for granted on the page i often make the reference uh with my students about how nowadays we look at a website you know you go to look um look up an article and there's all these ads and buttons and things flashing at us and we are trained to disregard things and just go to the main information and i find that sometimes they have the same approach to a manuscript a piece of music and i have to remind them that actually on the page every single marking is important and crucial and must be looked and acknowledged and taken in so absolutely yeah i still have my suzuki book one

Starting point is 00:47:38 where i i really didn't take it for granted i took every single uh i wrote out every single marking whether it was a legato line or a slur or a tempo marking or a dynamic and now uh the editions i've seen my students come in with now they all have these glossaries in the back the one i got um back in 2014 didn't have uh the glossary of all of those things in the back but i wrote my own out um back then and i would repeat it i have the composition books where i would try and repeat that table from memory so i'd actually know what those things meant when i encountered them and now like even at universities and other ensembles i'm playing beside professionals who aren't aware of these things or who aren't or had no idea the difference

Starting point is 00:48:29 between a romantic era and a baroque era trill and don't know what these different ornamentation symbols mean because this was extremely deliberate and had to be extremely deliberate on my part it's been to my benefit i can say you know picking up a sheet of music and being deliberately hyper aware of everything that's actually on the page and I think it's this word deliberate that's key here in your story because your approach to learning is really deliberate and that's what I love and I think that's what transpires when we look at your social media posts whether it's Instagram or Facebook and how deliberate you are in your approach to practicing and approaching repertoire this is really really great thank you very much and i yeah i try to keep um

Starting point is 00:49:21 you know i i learn a lot from uh teaching i teach a lot now and my instagram is almost up at 20 000 followers which isn't a lot by a lot of standards but it's it's enough for me um so my instagram is the violin doctor um and i started at the beginning of my uh doctoral program and i was hesitant about that instagram handle because i wasn't a doctor yet but i also knew that the the name would probably be be taken if i didn't take it so i took it but that was officially made true um about 17 hours ago at graduation i have a program that i run through the stories on instagram called ask emmanuel anything and so most of those are related to music and specifically violin performance so how you know how do you do this how do you do this

Starting point is 00:50:19 bow stroke how do you play the left hand pits variation nine from Paganini have you ever played Last Rose of Summer what do I have to look forward to in this because it looks like it looks like a walk through hell so this program has allowed me to share my my process with everyone who's been curious about it and it's been a tremendous tremendous help to me to even like you said review what your process actually is um so you can actually take it tweak it bend it uh and keep your process malleable to whatever shape uh or form you need uh at the present time yes not to lock yourself into a mode of practice because if you lock yourself into a mode where do you find yourself again you're right back into zombie mode that's almost like the human default setting just

Starting point is 00:51:19 because of the way the world and society is structured to go into zombie mode with a lot of things yes and it's uh it's corrosive to art corrosive to art i love that and i love that word you just used malleable because if i take um if i go back to the question i asked about a problem passage and you've mentioned many ways you know practicing slowly turning it around and if you do lock yourself into a rigid way of practicing a specific passage let's say a fast run well we can do different rhythms on the violin we can do we could try different bow stroke isolate the shifts but if you don't push further and try to come up with new ways to practice it and for me I find it fun to just try to ask the question what else what else could i try um or sometimes you get

Starting point is 00:52:17 bored with it you know you mentioned the cruiser etude if you're struggling with a shift or a trill in the piece why not pull out an etude that treats the trill and try to work on your trills um i think i've talked about this story before where i i got kind of tired of practicing schumann to scherzo so I took, um, Kurds are nine and practice it with the dynamics and stroke of Schumann too. And, um, the Schumann improved and I had a whole lot of fun while practicing it. And, you know, to just, it's like exactly what you say to really keep this learning approach malleable. I love it. Oh, absolutely. It's, it's so helpful. Um, One thing I've done recently is with the prelude to a preludeo from Bach's third partita, BVW 1006, an E major,

Starting point is 00:53:13 and to start the piece on an up bow, and to do all the bowing as marked in the opposite direction. So we go through this difficult variolage sections, the two and the one that modulates down a fifth on the other side of the page, and all these string crossings and arpeggiations with the opposite bow pattern. The goal is to make it sound at least as good as I had it with starting it on a down bow. And that's a creative thing because you can take an etude, and the etude kind of doesn't go beyond the scope of... You can make it musical and beautiful. That's kind of the definition of a good etude and good etude practice. But you'll never know the scope of what you can achieve

Starting point is 00:53:59 if you're not creative in the same way with your music. So they have to have that conversation to turn your music into a potential etude and to make your etudes as musical as possible. So I completely agree with what you say about that process of being invariably creative. Emmanuel, you and I have never met, but I certainly hope that you come back to Chicago soon and we can have a long conversation

Starting point is 00:54:28 about this kind of stuff. It'd be amazing. I'd really love to. It's my hometown. I'd love us to do the round of rapid fire questions, but I would really love to say a few words about the Violin Guild, if that's okay with you, because I think it's such an incredible platform.

Starting point is 00:54:45 I love that it brings violinists of all backgrounds together in what I feel like is a very safe and supportive environment. You and I talked about it a little bit before we started recording this podcast, but I love how you have professionals, amateurs, students, teachers. You know, it really bridges that gap between the different types of violinists and everyone comes together and exchanges, asks questions, answer them, offer encouragement and advice and support. For me, I feel like this spirit of community is really where it's at. And I find that I thrive on those exchanges with people who are passionate about music, regardless of whether or not they're professionals or amateur. How do you see this impacting the future of classical music? What is happening in the Violin Guild? sure sure well i um you know i've always had a lot of a lot of questions uh we've talked we had a good section on the topic of uh curiosity and retaining that childhood uh

Starting point is 00:55:49 curiosity that we have about you know all parts of a thing rather than just isolated to a specific event it's one reason why little kids are always seem distracted they're not distracted they're just hyper aware i think there's a big difference and i have the violin guild uh listed as an educational forum uh there are different uh categories that we can choose but the goal of the the guild had been initially to bring bowed string players together so we picked the violin because i wanted all bowed strings involved and the first title i had for it was the string guild and more than 50% of the members who were joining were guitarists and a few harpists and so I thought okay this isn't working and so the bowed string guild kind of worked but kind

Starting point is 00:56:43 of didn't because when you're looking for something to do with the cello or the violin or symphonies or orchestra as far as strings are concerned no one ever looks up the term bowed strings it's terrible on analytics and so I went with the violin guild because they're all instruments of the uh violin family and that name that name worked at least analytically and the community got grammy award winners uh in the group you have rachel barton pine chloe trevor um the wife of isaac stern joshua bell roman kim jeremy allen kittle the mad violinist uh grammy award winners and we've also got day one beginners and what we do we uh i have a team of uh administrators now uh you know i i've strongly advocated late starters

Starting point is 00:57:40 and so i didn't want them to feel excluded and i looked for someone who was interested in helping to administrate the violin guild with understanding and empathy for late starters and i found the ceo of uh late starter musician which was a web form uh for late star musicians of all backgrounds and she uh she took up that mantle and became uh another administrator and then chloe trevor joined um for outreach and so that the you know people started coming together and really helping to build this community and so now uh we're very very selective with um the exclusivity of the group the group is for bowed string players and we can trace the violin all the way back to uh mongolia and the morin core and how it worked its way north and became

Starting point is 00:58:39 the iru in south and became the sharanhi and then trade routes brought it to the west and it started taking on all these really really interesting shapes and eventually it takes on a standard shape in italy as the violin that we play today and so i invite all bowed string players to this Facebook forum. The goal of it and how I think it impacts the future is that our means of interaction, you know, it has to do with globalization. The world is increasingly more globalized and interconnected. A lot of issues that have arisen lately, just in America, for example, are a lot of people regard them as new issues and they're not. It's just we have a means to actually film and record things and people can actually show what's going on and people can

Starting point is 00:59:39 make a anyone can make a youtube video and reach the entire world in the blink of an eye actually slightly less time than that and so there's so much at our fingertips now it's the number one resource for so much and you know people even uh concert halls a significant number of most audiences now for major concert halls is through that concert hall's live stream and so i think it's uh why not allow that to be part of the the string communities um it should be a resource for us and now classical musicians have the somewhat true stigma of being very slow to adapt anything new uh whether it has to do with our our instruments or our tuning system or our performance attire you name it uh we're just always reputed to be slow to pick up anything new

Starting point is 01:00:43 but i think that this is what an essential an essential thing for us to be uh present in the way that the world connects today so that's the that's the goal of the guild and we're structured so that everyone has an equal voice we don't allow facebook reacts like the angry emoji we haven't had one of those and not a single one in months we've got rules for how to react to things and these rules are pretty strict and our vetting process is strict everyone who joins needs to have at least two images of them with their instrument we've had people who just wanted to market through the violin guild who googled an image of a violinist made it their profile picture and tried to join so we say you need at least two and we need to see evidence

Starting point is 01:01:40 that we're convinced uh that will convince us that you are a string player so it's extremely gainful uh i i know dozens and dozens of musicians who bought their not only their instruments but their their cases their bows they've gotten advice i've gotten advice i've asked for fingerings uh through the forum i've asked for suggestions i've found out about programs i mean we met through a similar interaction um and um a number of our audience comes from uh the violin guild and so i thought with the level of exclusivity that i sought that the group would just be very very small and unnoticed but the fact that i think it's the fact that everyone knew that they wouldn't have trolls in the group commenting that everyone commenting at uh at some level

Starting point is 01:02:33 would be a string player a bowed string player would be responding and that you'd get responses from all levels of uh people we've had people who've made cases for itzhak perlman uh talking about cases uh people who've performed all 24 of paganini's caprices in the same concert giving advice to people picking it up for the first time for their college audition it's uh it's fantastic and you know people offer advice when it when it's asked and if someone posts a recording just to be appreciated no one's saying you know you're you're um this is great but your intonation is terrible um no one's shutting each other down and the forum doesn't have uh tolerance for that so it's just been very great and positive and we're coming up on 35 000 members every last

Starting point is 01:03:28 one of whom is a string player and it's gotten to a point where you know we've got at least a couple members from every major ensemble in uh in the country and outside of the country so it's uh it's been brilliant um thanks for thank you for mentioning it also you know i i love it so much because i know that for me it's a big source of inspiration what you were mentioning about i mean i love reading the comments um when you talk about the professional answering to you know the questions and to get other people's perspective on a different technique all aspect and for me it's always food for thoughts it's always also a reminder of focusing on the basics on keeping my own basics sharp but it's also feeding i'm feeding of this energy that

Starting point is 01:04:20 a lot of the amateurs and beginners have this enthusiasm that they have this thirst for knowledge. And also just, you know, I love the violin. I love talking about the violin. And if I feel like I can help out someone else, it's really great. I feel like the overall exchange between all of us is so much fun. And again, a big source of inspiration for me. So thank you for creating that because i feel like it's a very important community that you created um are you ready for a round of rapid fire questions uh sure sure and thank you for the kind words on on uh the violin guild that's um facebook.com slash grab uh groups slash the violin guild um i'm really grateful that you mentioned it and uh your kind words about it

Starting point is 01:05:12 mean the world to me it means that it's doing its job i'm really grateful for that i'll put a link in the show note for it as well thank you so as we've heard you're a doctor and you're already teaching so tell us what does your life looks like now well uh right now i've uh like i said I just graduated a few hours ago, and I've already got a good portfolio career, to use the term of musicologist Mark Clegg, where there's just a lot involved, a lot put together. Every performance major I know at any level is, you know, they're part-time performer, part-time arranger, part-time media social activist, part-time teacher, and that's what my career is already building into. I've got a private studio of 19 students of all levels.

Starting point is 01:06:14 My oldest is 73 or 74, and my youngest is eight, and I have a wonderful time teaching them because this is my uh campus town i've uh i've started a freelance uh freelance work and uh i recently played for a theater company called the scoundrel and scamp theater downtown where i i'm also a composer i hope there's a moment to speak about that but i'm an active and high output composer and i wrote over an hour's worth of music for a theatrical work That's also a huge part of my career and what I'd like to do more of with it. I've written 24 Caprices, 3 Fugues for solo violin. I'm finishing my third complete string quartet.

Starting point is 01:07:08 That's extremely fulfilling for me. It also allows more music so that everything we play isn't 200 years old. I think current projects I'm in right now, michael dauphine is a professor from the fred fox school of music at the university of arizona he lives in the residence of camille holst and he was the first music director of the tucson symphony orchestra and he has started to curate concerts at that home because there's a really nice space for performing and he's interested in having new music performed in this space and it's a you know it's a great opportunity it pays well and the musicians are

Starting point is 01:07:50 interested and one thing I really appreciate about writing music and putting it out is at this point people are commissioning stuff fairly often and are asking when projects that I'm writing will be completed I rewrote the Bach Chaconne recently that was part of my doctoral lecture recital so I'm just really grateful to have a portfolio career at this point that involves everything I love about music. And it involves so many of my best friends and favorite people that I've met through music. That's a really good full schedule right there. Emmanuel, what skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments? Sure, I can, in a word, I will absolutely say composition. It's been extremely

Starting point is 01:08:44 helpful to me, and that's been the model for learning Western music. I always say that music is a language. We read it, we write it, we speak it on our instruments. Those used to all be taught together as as you would expect of any language and and like any other language we use it to express some part of the human experience beethoven not only had the the the musical chops to compose piano concerti but he also premiered them himself same with mozart and they conducted symphonies i think just being well-rounded in the musical uh language is huge you know i i learned so much about uh markings and realizing the process of a composer helps to be aware of that hyper aware of that when you're reading what composers write which is a huge part of what

Starting point is 01:09:49 what we do as performers and patterns and what they're using, compositional devices. When I started to write music, it also helped me to memorize things much more quickly. And I think that composition really stemmed also from the deliberation that I had with learning to read music in the first place. I know also, on the side note, I know that this was part of your doctoral project wasn't it to write additional variations to the Bach Chaconne yes yes and of course I've gotten some uh it's a controversial thing to do um you know Bach is Bach is revered and he's uh I mean if I were to name a favorite composer it would be Bach without question I try to have some on every uh program that I have I've played everything that he's written for the

Starting point is 01:10:44 violin it's like a few of the sonatas that he's written for violin harpsichord that i haven't but all the sonatas and partitas and uh concerti yes um and with the chaconne there's been a long tradition primarily enacted by performer composers to rewrite music that they perform uh and we've seen examples of this it's been you can trace it back to um 13th and 14th centuries with leonin and periton troping uh gregorian chants um and uh into uh organum and they're rewriting things for their own uh interpretation of the work and then you can fast forward how many was it six centuries to to tchaikovsky and And Leopold Auer, rewriting, I think it was Leopold Auer,

Starting point is 01:11:40 who rewrote the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. No one really heard it until Heifetz premiered that version of it at Carnegie Hall. And then you've got the Spohr and the Kreisler versions of the Paganini First Concerto. So he's been rewriting things all the time. But it's part of that, there's a stigma when it comes to Bach, because he's our most untouchable and revered composer. but other musicians who aren't bowed string players rewrite Bach all the time. You can look at the guitar versions of the transcriptions for guitar with the chaconne

Starting point is 01:12:15 and the Bussoni chaconne on piano. And I thought this would be really great to do on the violin, but people complain about it being a transcription. But when you think about it, Bach wrote the thing between 1720 and 1750 in the Kutin Principality. And it had no documented performance whatsoever until 1840 with Mendelssohn. So we actually ended the Baroque era, skipped over an entire era, classical era, and then went into the Romantic era when it was finally played by Mendelssohn. And Mendelssohn, the premiere of the Chaconne, was also a recomposition of it.

Starting point is 01:12:57 It wasn't the Chaconne. he had David Ferdinand on a Ferdinand David on violin. Um, uh, and, uh, while he wrote an entire accompaniment for forte piano. Uh, so that was kind of the beginning of the Chaconne and its popularity. I think it's been our, uh, institutional structures that have brought string players to think that some music is almost biblical. It's untouchable. You shouldn't, mess with it or change a dot or a word in it uh even galamian gets uh a lot of uh scrutiny for uh changing a lot of the a lot of the bowings uh in the music and herman's edition which is probably the most popular version for students um largely due to the fact that it's also the

Starting point is 01:13:49 cheapest it's uh he actually he changes a couple of notes in the book but uh i want to show that this could actually be an expressive thing on the violin plus the violin that we use now is super different from the baroque violin and you know it in the it was during Bach's lifetime that we started to get standard violin fingerboards but they likely weren't the ones Bach had used the ones that were super common and most common had a fingerboard that was 40 millimeters shorter than the standard fingerboard that we've got today. And we're talking instruments that had no chin rest and no shoulder rest

Starting point is 01:14:30 and a bow that's bent in the opposite direction and is a good six inches shorter. And the strings, that's huge. They're not made out of metal then. They're made out of cat gut. And that's not the guts of cats, but it is guts. It's the cat short for cattle. And they use the intestinal lining from cows

Starting point is 01:14:51 to make strings every pitch on that instrument sounds extremely different from a modern day violin and so part of the concept of rewriting the chaconne is also to write it for the modern violin which i regard as a different instrument entirely uh and so this was my but it was also to use the devices that bach had used you know answering the question what would bach have written what might bach have written had he had a modern violin to use and if you're writing for that instrument and uh and what do i want to express what do i want to say in the musical language through the chaconne and can is it legitimate to use composition and recomposition as part of the interpretational approach so my uh dissertation topic was answering all of these

Starting point is 01:15:49 questions and uh i performed it i've got some clips of it up on on my instagram uh full video go on youtube as soon as i have a chance to actually sit down that's a fascinating topic and there are big questions to be discussing for sure do you have a favorite tool in the practice room the uh the metronome i i really i'm very strong about it's when i was rehearsing under gustavo dudamel during the 2010 no 2000 uh 2008 cymi chicago youth musicians initiative i think um he had said uh you must realize that none uh no two eighth notes any of you play at any point will ever be exactly the same so you need to strive extra hard to bring them uh to as close the same value as possible and that that stuck

Starting point is 01:16:51 with me because i hadn't realized that at all at that point i thought you know if an ensemble has two eighth notes everyone's playing the same value and no it's it's an effort and again it has to do with the cerebral involvement with music of not taking for granted that everyone is just playing the same value that you actually need to put work and effort and mindful playing into your rhythmic divisions of time. And so having a really strong sense of pulse, I think is, it's more crucial than I think is regarded in um a lot of practice and i think a lot of uh professionals uh students are have the benefit of uh having someone who constantly reminds them to work with a metronome when you

Starting point is 01:17:50 leave the when you stop taking lessons um no one's reminding you anymore you're responsible on your own and some people you know when you start doing the actual music career um some days you get up and it's just you know you're becoming a better violinist isn't the first goal the first goal is like putting food on the table and so you forget the things that actually keep your skills in check so yeah definitely the metronome is my favorite practice tool there's so much you can do with it the metronomes that we've got today are just incredible you can slow them down to you know whatever point you want in a piece and then have it speed up through another section you can have any kind of subdivision the metronomes that exist now are just incredible and they're you know

Starting point is 01:18:46 literally hundreds of times cheaper than the Dr. Beats were even when I had started. A great way to put metronome work in perspective. Do you have a piece of advice that was given to you and that you would like to pass on to the listeners? Of course, sure. I've received so much great advice while playing. have had the huge uh blessing of extremely uh extremely experienced and wonderful caring teachers i think of those the one that would stand out is being uh mindfully creative

Starting point is 01:19:31 um in your in your practice uh the practice is where you know there's a there's a part of the performer where i think we've all experienced uh and i hope i'm not just speaking for myself i'd be really sad um where we've all experienced um where you sound uh you sound amazing you know you sound godly in the practice room and then you get on stage and you you don't sound godly and I think that there's bridging that gap my goal is to always be in a frame of mind of performing

Starting point is 01:20:12 even if I'm practicing I'm trying to practice my best even if that doesn't mean sounding my best some exercises defaultedly don't sound good but I want my process to be of a high quality so I practice

Starting point is 01:20:30 with the energy of being on the stage and so that when I'm on the stage I can feel like I do in the practice room thus marrying that gap so for performance majors that's my number one piece of advice is to let your practice room feel like the stage

Starting point is 01:20:53 so that the stage can feel like the practice room and you're always in your comfort zone no matter what Oh, this is fantastic advice. Thank you. Emmanuel, how about a quick actionable tip that listeners could implement today in their musical lives? To practice in a different way than you've ever practiced before. How different can you make your practice while still aiming to improve? uh if you don't try different methods of improvement you lock into one and again it's

Starting point is 01:21:31 been kind of the theme of what i've been saying is avoiding zombie mode there's so much you can do with the piece of music uh beyond just a rote you know changing of rhythms and speeding up the metronome a click a day you know what can you do differently you can start the piece with the bow moving in the opposite direction you build so many skills from trying it that way um if you have a trill that you've always you know you'd see it's a trill that you've always gone to third position with to trill with your second finger or your third finger try doing it with the fourth finger if you don't use it you lose it that's the saying but the truth of it is you don't use it you never have it in the first place you want these things in your arsenal even if they don't if it's

Starting point is 01:22:23 not something that you use in that piece in that moment or in that performance that technique is then in the arsenal for when you need to use it you have a trill you want to turn to a double trill but you just don't because it's not there and it's not in the music so you don't need to do it you know you're the goal of music at least in my opinion isn't to just isn't to play what's on the page it's to communicate what do you want to say um and you won't even know what you can say if you're not creative in the practice so i i heavily encourage everyone uh i'm encouraging myself at the same time as I'm saying it to practice in a different way that you have before while keeping your same goals in mind. That's really awesome. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:23:18 Emmanuel, you've touched on so many important topics today and you're such an inspiring person and musician. Thank you so much for sitting down with me and chatting today. Oh, thank you. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I hope to hope to be on the show again sometime. And yeah, you have a have a wonderful weekend. Thank you guys so much for listening. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Emmanuel Abraham. I personally am completely in awe of his unwavering determination. And I'm feeling really inspired by his approach. If you've listened to all the episodes of the podcast, you know I love to chat and I would love to chat with you. So before you go, snap a screenshot as

Starting point is 01:24:14 you're listening to this week's episode and tag me on Instagram using the handle mindoverfinger. I always love to see who's listening and that way I can share your screenshot on my story. As always, you can find the show notes for this episode and resources on mindful and deliberate practice at mindoverfinger.com. You can also visit emmanuelabraham.com for all the details about Emmanuel's career and upcoming performances. If you're looking for a community of mindful practice enthusiasts, join the Mind Over Finger tribe at facebook.com slash groups slash mindoverfingertribe. We're a super supportive community and with us, you'll find inspiration, motivation, and discussions on how to take your practice to the next level and enjoy

Starting point is 01:25:01 the process. I also want to say a huge thank you to those of you who have left reviews on iTunes. I read every single one of them and it means the world to me. This podcast is truly a passion project for me and your kind words make it all worthwhile. Your reviews also help people find the podcast. So if you've enjoyed this episode and feel like it brought some value to you, please do me a favor and hop over to iTunes to write a few words. As I said, it means the world to me and I truly appreciate it. Next week, I'll be talking with cellist David Eby about the power of mindfulness and meditation in both practice and performance. Again, thank you and à bientôt! Thank you.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 021 Dr. Immanuel Abraham: How Determination & Dedicated Work Lead to Success

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