The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 063 Robert Hanford: Exploration in Practice

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 63. 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 hope you're doing amazing today i have a very special guest on the podcast violinist robert hanford concertmaster of the chicago lyric opera orchestra robert joined the lyric opera in 2004 and before that he was the associate principal second violinist of the Minnesota Orchestra, a member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and a member of

Starting point is 00:00:51 Chicago's Grand Park Symphony. He's appeared as soloist on many occasions with the Minnesota Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, and other Midwestern orchestras, including the Chicago Philharmonic, and he maintains an active performance schedule as a chamber musician. During the summer, Robert is concertmaster at the Aspen Music Festival. He graduated with first prize from the Orpheus Conservatory in Athens, Greece, and attended Northwestern University, where he's currently on the faculty as a violin instructor. In this episode, we discuss many important topics, including curiosity and exploration in practicing, the importance of maintaining a strong technical regimen, strategies to learn and handle a lot of repertoire in the context of an orchestra job,

Starting point is 00:01:36 and tactics to foster focus in the practice room. Robert is an incredible musician with great wisdom, and I know you'll find much inspiration in what he's sharing with us today. Let's go to the show. Robert Hanford, thank you so much for being on the show today. My pleasure. Sure. Robert, for the listeners who don't know who you are, would you please tell us a little bit about how you got started and how you got to where you are today? Yes. I grew up

Starting point is 00:02:18 from the age of eight in Athens, Greece, and studied the violin there. I had a violin teacher that my mother managed to connect me with, who was very fine. So I had kind of an unconventional for an american kid childhood my parents eventually moved back to the united states but i stayed on in greece i went to a boarding school an international school which has really marked me um culturally i uh continued to study with this violin teacher and his family became my guardians, his wife and he were my guardians, and I would spend weekends there. His two sons were also violinists, so many hours were spent practicing there. It was very inspiring to hear other musicians working. I had no idea what I was going to do with the violin,

Starting point is 00:03:23 But at that point, I knew what I was going to be, which was a violinist. I moved back to the United States to go to school at Northwestern. I studied with Myron Cartman at that point. And I had no idea what my career path was going to be. It was a little bit of a floundering time. and I went through one or two years of kind of down, I mean really massive down time. By my junior year I had come out of it and I was practicing again and I feel that the trigger that really sort of brought me back to life

Starting point is 00:04:07 in my personal life, in my violinistic life, was two things. chamber music and the idea that I could work and make money. I had started to freelance with a string quartet. We played weddings. We played things like that, which at the time was actually a good way you could start to make your living that way. So I always think of work as kind of my salvation. It's the thing that injected meaning into my life, apart from just playing the violin. I got out of school and started freelancing, and that was wonderful. I had money for food, for rent, and maybe some beer. But the freelancing then started to look different to me

Starting point is 00:05:11 once I noticed that there were some elderly people that were freelancing and had been doing the same jobs I started to think is that where I want to be and I could also I could freelance

Starting point is 00:05:27 I could play in my string quartet just by becoming an excellent sight reader and also So just practicing an hour and a half of technique a day would keep me in good shape for whatever I needed to do. But I wanted something beyond that as well. So I heard that there was a gentleman who was teaching, a friend of mine was studying with him,

Starting point is 00:05:57 who had just arrived from Soviet Union from the Leningrad Philharmonic, Leningrad Symphony. He had been one of the concert masters there and was now in the CSO. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to keep going. I have my own ideas. I'm on my own track, but I need outside influences still. So I went and I started to take lessons with him. His name was Albert Golnikov.

Starting point is 00:06:26 And the very first lesson, he said, I'd be happy to teach you. Take a week and think about it, but I don't teach for fun. I don't teach for fun I don't teach people to play for fun you can do competitions with me or you can work to get a a job and I thought

Starting point is 00:06:45 I needed to get a job so that's where my orchestra career started I do remember my teacher at in Greece as being my two teachers I also studied a bit in Switzerland

Starting point is 00:07:00 and that was a huge foundation technically my teacher in Greece violinistically kind of spiritually actually what I took away from my time at Northwestern with Myron Cartman was his expertise with chamber music

Starting point is 00:07:17 that really has had a huge resonance with also my orchestral career and then from Albert it was the idea of continuing the technique track the excerpt track and the solo track um all together and the idea that that i was um on a path

Starting point is 00:07:39 for something and then i got into grand park and that was the start of my orchestra career i think that's where i'll stop my bio a very good career i love what you're saying about how you at some point really decided started to think about what you wanted and realized that you had your own ideas but still wanted some outside guidance and that's something that young people sometimes get out of school and they think that's it they're done learning i was a sponge i um after we started um touring with orchestras milwaukee symphony and then to a lesser extent minnesota Orchestra. I visited all the libraries. I found all the books I could about violin playing. And there are a lot out there that I think are valuable. Many of us don't read books anymore.

Starting point is 00:08:36 But yeah, I found books about Dunas. I found some of the more obscure Dunas things. I found Tartelier's book, How I Play, How I Teach. And all of these books, even if you get one sentence out of them you can feed on that for a month five months or a year or more than a year I think

Starting point is 00:09:03 and that makes a big difference this curiosity I'm still the same way I'm still the same way and now it's not only books about music or about string playing but it's trying to take things from

Starting point is 00:09:19 other areas There was a, Francis Brun, who was a great juggler, said, you can study juggling, but take influences from outside and bring them into what you're doing. And he became a flamenco juggler. That's amazing. Yeah. Robert, you really strike me as a very refined performer and a thorough thinker. And that's something I very much admire from you and feel very inspired by. I'm glad I give you that impression.

Starting point is 00:09:57 I'd love to hear about maybe some of your general views on practicing, maybe things that you think enhance your practicing and are of value to you. There are several areas that I feel strongly for me. One is keeping the technique time, etudes, scales, whatever, working on vibrato, open strings, and then practicing your repertoire. The technique time has been great for me. Sometimes it's been fruitless, knocking my head against the wall, but I've always been searching. and if you can keep that technique time and relate it make it valuable to the things that you have to do musically that's very important my uncle charlie who was from hungary an amateur cellist when i was 12 i heard yeah charlie still practiced the cello always had his technique time

Starting point is 00:11:01 i think that sentence made a huge impression on me and it's been very valuable for me mm-hmm as far as practicing goes changes from year to year i'm sure it does with you too um anything that you do if you do it too long kind of loses its value so i find i become obsessed with something i can practice it for a few months or a few years and then after the end of that time period i find myself working on something else for a while it was dunes independence of the three and four fingers um uh right now i'm i still do open strings you're in an opera house as you can tell i would leave that on yes i'll leave it on yeah yeah it changes um as long as you have the idea have ideas uh one thing i find too is it's

Starting point is 00:12:03 important to practice for in ways that appeal to you if if i just think it's homework uh basically i want to burn the violin and never play again so i try to find things that are are rewarding for me to do even if they're not always terribly practical but try to keep it alive in some way. There's a question I get from a lot of listeners and I wanted to ask you also for selfish reasons. So one of the most difficult thing that we do when we transition out of school and let's say get a job is having to deal with a huge amount of repertoire to learn. So that's one thing. I mean, I know how I do it these days. I can't wait to hear what you say about it so I can keep searching and try new things um and i mean we're experiencing it right now with for me

Starting point is 00:13:03 learning four wagner operas to be played soon but what is a process that you would recommend to young musicians how to handle this amount of repertoire how to learn repertoire well if you've gotten into an orchestra you're already good and so your sight reading is really excellent that's invaluable you can't practice everything all the time I always spent when I was in symphony orchestras I especially my last job which was I think nine or ten years with the Minnesota Orchestra I always had my hour early that I was at work wherever it was in a practice room the office supply room was my one of my practice rooms for a long time a half hour of warming up technique then half an hour on stage looking at the passages in the music hopefully including

Starting point is 00:14:03 some of the melodic passages as well as just the tricky stuff but just to have that time in symphony orchestra the hard thing always is the the modern piece and you do start less sight reading and more preparing when you sit on one of the first stands once i got into opera then i got in as concert master so now i instead of being proud of my sight reading i'm proud not to be sight reading anymore so i do still rely on strong technique practice so that my intonation i don't have to work on intonation as much in the music or vibrato or phrasing so that element of sight reading still remains but then The one thing my predecessor did, Everett, Everett Mirsky, Zlatkov Mirsky,

Starting point is 00:15:03 he marked out all the passages that he would practice and put a metronome, his ideal metronome mark, which sometimes is extremely fast. But I think he always tried to work it up with a metronome. That's one thing I do. I don't try to get to the ultimate metronome at first. I play what is comfortable and for me it's important I leave a written memo of what I got yesterday and then after about a week I can look at that and say oh wow look where I've come from

Starting point is 00:15:40 there and also what's interesting is some days you work it up to something and the next day you're not functioning as well another thing that I did for a while was I would practice with rhythms but never one passage, all the rhythms. I find that just confuses me. It makes a jumble. I assign myself one or two rhythms to a passage, different rhythms, different passages, and practice with the rhythms. And over the course of three, four days, a week, two weeks, then I try to become an expert in those rhythms and those passages rather than it keeps it fresh for me rather than oh i'm going to go through all the rhythms do that it's just uh you know then it becomes kind of a jungle yeah go ahead one thing i love in what you said is that you said over the days over the weeks

Starting point is 00:16:36 is that there are some pieces that come very quickly but then there are others that we need to revisit weekly yes absolutely a lot of these ring things um i thought i i thought it would come back faster than it did this uh the god of denmarung uh passages were just uh disconcerting um when i learned that opera i was between jobs i was in a new house in evanston and we had guests and socially i could always say i have to go practice so uh that was encouraging to be able to spend a few hours uh daily on god of damerung but i have to say it didn't come back um didn't come back very quickly but it will but that's the importance of planning ahead to not just look at what's coming up next week but

Starting point is 00:17:32 more like what's coming up next month yeah yeah i wish i was better at that renee it's not the answer you want to hear but yeah i always know you know what i robert spano said no matter how well prepared he is there's always cramming there's always some surprises by the time mr spano you get up earlier in the morning uh another thing i used to do is practice late at night and i don't do that anymore i i i can't you know but as a student the night nighttime practicing but um now i like to practice during the day and i like to also know when i'm not practicing you know what are some of the ways you've mentioned already practicing with rhythm and things like this what are some of the ways that you maybe foster focus when you practice okay yeah

Starting point is 00:18:23 oh it depends on what i'm practicing probably somewhat different with a solo piece that i have play i love categorizing so one thing i've done and this changes from year to year but i like to assign myself different ways of thinking about passages uh the vibrato way what am i doing with the vibrato how am i developing the vibrato just the same way i would practice different rhythms with different passages i can practice different vibratos on different notes um finger the different types of finger vibrato wrist arm vibrato um speed versus width even with a chart uh that's one thing intonation resonance intervals double stops diatonic intonation versus kind of the piano style of intonation

Starting point is 00:19:28 i do think in categories phrasing gestures in the music shapes individual shapes in the notes shapes in the phrase all those things in more kind of keep it alive for me so that rather it being homework it's uh an exploration because i sometimes i don't like to open up the case but once i open up the case and start practicing it becomes more interesting yeah i boy um sometimes I actually yeah I will write I will use a pencil I'll write and keep a record of what I'm practicing in a passage

Starting point is 00:20:13 whether it could be practicing getting to the tip practicing getting to the frog practicing bow distribution all these things that we think about sometimes I write down so I found now that I don't have a teacher

Starting point is 00:20:28 I'd like to be my own teacher so I give myself assignments that's really good i really like that robert i want to keep you for a long time but we have a four-hour opera coming our way tonight okay so maybe i can get you through the rapid fire please yes one of my favorite questions in this one in this list is about the habit so what is a habit that you have that you think contributed to your success one of them and i learned this from a colleague many years ago when i was in grant park is always

Starting point is 00:21:08 have time where you play your instrument to yourself and practice yourself before you go out and play with an orchestra and i would notice this particular person practicing he had a special tree he practiced under but i've always found wherever i go i mentioned the office supply place you one could see me practicing in my car at certain points in my career before a run out mysterious places in gymnasiums and in schools although you have to make sure that you don't get locked out and start pounding which has happened on tour to to various people but yes always have that time uh pure time before you go out and that's one thing that you mentioned earlier that i want to um underline one more time is when you're talking about really keeping um

Starting point is 00:22:06 the technical skills strong at all time because i think that's so important and it's so true that if you really maintain all of these basics you know soccer soccer player football players they do these drills all the time to really um oh yeah work on your mission that's really really important as long yes as long as they they pertain to what you do in your in your music yeah i agree what skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments maybe juggling i i found that at one point i was a violin nerd but i didn't start from nerd uh i had a very active childhood with soccer and um drawing sculpture started with sculpture that fell away but um and reading um i think the more diverse you are the better uh

Starting point is 00:22:57 it always to be diverse in your character adds to what you do rather than subtracts yeah um and then as i i've gotten older i've come back to that in a way is there a performance that has stayed with you throughout the years and if so why story time uh it was the intermezzo to cavalleria rusticana and um at one point the organ comes in the the conductor got involved with um the bases he wanted them to do something different i showed up at work early and he was working with them on their new part that's fine we get to the performance and the organ comes in

Starting point is 00:23:54 just triple forte and it's one half step wrong with what the orchestra is doing and it's complete cacophony and people are trying to

Starting point is 00:24:10 the organist is playing he doesn't realize at first and people are trying this is an electric kind of thing people are trying to flip the switches to get it to turn off i don't think this is what you wanted to hear but but uh finally it got turned off the conductor looked at the audience clicked his heels bowed and strode off but somebody came to the archives early the next morning to try to get a copy of this and it was already deleted from the archives yeah but actually many

Starting point is 00:24:47 performances with the Minnesota Orchestra, just great performances. The orchestra could play play itself, concerto for orchestra, all the symphonies, all the Don Juan tone poems. One time we had a recording session and we wound up with extra time and the library came out with copies of copies of Don Juan I think it was and we read Don Juan down one one take and that's our recording with the Minnesota Orchestra Don Juan that or the orchestra could play and that's what you get when you work with the orchestra that plays things over and over again and plays with itself and has members that that there's some continuity it's we're not always changing it was amazing that's very special very special we talked about practicing for sure okay and we talked about

Starting point is 00:25:47 how you approach learning repertoire but i'd love to hear a little bit about uh you know for people who are curious about the life of a concert master what does that look like um well i i i rely much less on sight reading than i used to um it has been ingrained in me and it works different with different groups, uh, what I do, uh, body wise, people usually can only see me from behind. Um, so they only see what I'm doing in my torso and my spine and what, how do they know, uh, how much bow I'm using, what position I I'm in. So I try to be very clear with those things. and i am aware of sort of like the golf swing uh idea how do you use your torso and body to produce the strokes and like to think that it's pretty obvious and i have to say i i surprised

Starting point is 00:26:45 i found some footage of myself buried in a conductor's youtube video once and um It looked pretty obvious. I think I'm pretty clear with what I'm doing. But that's also for chamber music as well. And I do like close contact with, as we had in the Minnesota Orchestra, with other principals. but of course in pit in the pit things get set up a little bit differently and people are more behind me than i would like do you have a favorite tool in the practice room i don't use tuners uh use double stops but uh students can get benefit from that i selectively use the metronome not so that i can play like the metronome but because that just gives me a shot of discipline when I need it, occasionally. That's a very good one. What's one thing that you like to impress on your students? My attitude about teaching is a lot different than

Starting point is 00:27:53 it was 15 years ago, and I'm more relaxed now. I realize that I can't spoon feed, that it's not to their advantage to spoon feed. So hopefully I help them teach themselves. And when I look back at how I learned, it was kind of like a sponge, but it wasn't necessarily what the teacher was teaching me, sometimes very tangential. So I think if a student can walk out and have two or three ideas, maybe even one or two, that's enough for me. That's a really great message. And finally, do you have a quick actionable tip that the listeners could implement today in their practice room? Okay. This is something I did for a while, and it only works with a short amount of music.

Starting point is 00:28:45 Because if you do any more than a short amount of music, you'll go hide under the covers for a week. But not having a teacher, I thought, how can I start to guide myself? and I got this idea at one point I was an amateur magician when I was a teenager there was something that did not make sense to me in the book I read it was that as magicians we should all have or we should all start to think more and more about having a script having a little play book for the tricks we're doing instead of just mastering the patter and the technical skills and at the time i read it it didn't make any sense to me so i went off to learn the new next trick but now i've started to think about that the past 10 years and i experimented with this for a while

Starting point is 00:29:44 i would put a script in the music of what i wanted to think about superficial to to the notes i was playing not superficial but underneath so first i experimented with a technical script the things that i could think of technically to do and i would play slowly it could be starting with the attack the vibrato you're using the shape of the note the attack of next note, the intervals that you have in the scale, the smooth shift, relax my legs, because that's where I get tight sometimes. It could be anything. And I would learn that script and then off to something else. Then I experimented with having another script under of feelings. What kind of feelings the sound could be, have a kind of oaky sound to it. The vibrato could be a

Starting point is 00:30:42 pressing vibrato, comfort at the tip, feelings. So a different kind of script. And I would practice those and then maybe throw them away and do an entirely different one. I found it kind of gave me the freedom to practice what i wanted to think about in sense when i was playing and whenever you do that it sort of crowds out all the other stuff that you might not want to think about like am i going to miss this shift or um is my bow going to start shaking so it came as a replacement for those thoughts and i found that very valuable again many of the things i do i do them for a couple of years and then move on to something else and then i might come back to it that's the advantage of living a long time you can come back to it in 20 years but and i have

Starting point is 00:31:41 come back to some things like that but maybe that make a script for yourself and try it out on three measures it can be anything you want to think about but it pertains to what you want not what a teacher is telling you to do i love what you're saying about really going deep into something and thinking deeply but still keeping the flexibility that in a few years you might think differently or do different things yeah the flexibility is good i do think of it as a game sometimes when you're in orchestra to have the flexibility to listen to other things to respond to a conductor to hear what's behind you to wonder what another person is thinking about and look at what your stand partner is doing and i have to say over the years stand partners have been great teachers

Starting point is 00:32:31 as well um and so i used to think of it as having sentience when you're when you're playing an orchestra that's very true thank you so much robert for taking the time to sit with me my pleasure it's really flied by thank you guys so much for listening I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Robert Hanford for those of you who listened to the show before you know that I'm 100% on board with what he said about curiosity it's so easy to walk in the practice room and start repeating things mindlessly and expect progress, but that's just not going to work. Even with the best of intentions, sometimes we get caught up in the things that we think we have to do to get better. But we practice

Starting point is 00:33:26 without really exploring deeply and experimenting. And the truth is that when we get curious and we get creative, we assimilate concepts and instructions really differently. So what if you got curious. For example, what if you made a list of three, four, five things you're really wondering about when it comes to your instrument or a specific piece or technique or style of playing and took some time to do some research, experiment and have some fun with it. Or it could be as simple as putting time aside to play repertoire that you want to play versus repertoire you have to learn and explore, treat yourself and see where that leads you, the inspiration that comes or what other questions pop up. Another thing to keep in mind, as you heard us discuss,

Starting point is 00:34:19 and as Robert mentioned, is that we so often wait for easy answers and solutions to come from an outside source, a teacher, a coach, a colleague, or an online tutorial. And there's so many great resources out there and so many great books. And you can get inspired by as little as one sentence you hear or read, as Robert said. But the findings and the solutions are within yourself. And they come with practicing with a real sense of curiosity and exploration. Much progress comes from within. I would love to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation are. So please get in touch with me. I am mindoverfinger on both Instagram and Facebook. And of course, you can find me at mindoverfinger.com, where you can find resources, more information about

Starting point is 00:35:12 mindful practice and sign up for my newsletter. Also, if you're looking for a community of mindful practice enthusiasts, consider joining the Mind Over Finger tribe. That's my Facebook group where I pop in once a week to talk about mindful practice and answer your questions. You can find it at facebook.com slash groups slash mindoverfingertribe. And because I like to make things as easy as possible for you guys, I'll have all those links in the show notes. So that's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 063 Robert Hanford: Exploration in Practice

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