The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 079 Ira Gold: Practicing Wisdom

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

In this inspiring and motivating conversation, National Symphony double bass player Ira Gold shares his wisdom on practicing and on leading a meaningful musical life. Ira expands on: How the things he does are reflections of his passions How serving the community and those who are following the artistic path has become vital part of his career How his career grew out of him making the conscious decision of seriously dedicating himself to his musical education The important of adopting a growth mindset and of being mindful of the information that is available to you and how you can apply it to nurture your long-term goals The importance of being teachable The new metrics he uses to define success How the pandemic has allowed him to take a step back and reflect Practicing strategies: Constructing and deconstructing Adding and subtracting How to bring life experiences into your art – everything you experience and everything you are influences your playing How to maximize your learning experience – in college and beyond       MORE ABOUT IRA: Website: https://irajgold.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BassRabbi   Ira Gold made his Carnegie Hall solo debut in 2011, performing the Vanhal Bass Concerto with the Catholic University of America Symphony Orchestra. Prior to joining the National Symphony in 2005, he performed with several American orchestras, as Section Bass with the Minnesota Orchestra and as guest Principal Bassist with the San Francisco Symphony and Detroit Symphony.  He has attended festivals such as Grand Teton Music Festival, Domaine Forget Music Academy, Bach Festival Leipzig, Aspen, and Tanglewood.  Mr. Gold spent several summers at the International Festival Institute at Round Top both as a student and faculty.  He is continually in demand for recitals and masterclasses, including recent visits at The Colburn School, University of Southern California, The Moscow State Conservatory, Boston University, New England Conservatory, Boston Conservatory, University of Colorado (Boulder), The Juilliard School, Boston University Tanglewood Institute,  The International Society of Bassists Convention, and The Manhattan School of Music.   Mr. Gold maintains a studio of private students, has taught lessons and coached chamber music in the National Symphony Orchestra Youth Fellowship program, and has been a Double Bass Faculty member of Peabody Conservatory since 2009.  He is also a co-founding member of Peabody Bass Works, a one week bass camp held every July at Peabody Conservatory. Mr. Gold has been interviewed multiple times by Jason Heath for the podcast Contrabass Conversations, and more recently as a featured guest on The Audition Breakthrough Summit, which launched in March 2017. In 2016 he published an article for the ISB's journal Bass World, in which he discusses the qualities of teaching that affect the relationship of teacher and student. An active chamber musician, Mr. Gold has performed with East Coast Chamber Orchestra, the NSO Millenium Stage Prelude Series, Peabody Conservatory Faculty, and the New Orchestra of Washington. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree at Boston University's College of Fine Arts, and his Master of Music degree at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, where he won the strings division of the 2005 Concerto Competition.  His primary teachers include Edwin Barker and Paul Ellison, and additional studies with Albert Laszlo, Kenneth Harper, Dennis Whittaker, Mark Shapiro, and Harry Lantz.   Visit www.mindoverfinger.com and sign up for my newsletter to get your free guide to a super productive practice!  This guide is the perfect entry point to help you bring more mindfulness and efficiency into your practice and it's filled with tips and tricks on how to use that wonderful tool to take your practicing and your playing to new heights!   And don't forget to join the Mind Over Finger Tribe for additional resources on practice and performing! If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review on iTunes!  I truly appreciate your support!     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme!  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson. Thank you to Susan Blackwell for the introduction!  You can find out more about Susan, her fantastic podcast The Spark File, and her work helping creatives of all backgrounds expand their impact by visiting https://www.susanblackwell.com/home. Also a HUGE thank you to my fantastic producer, Bella Kelly!   MIND OVER FINGER: www.mindoverfinger.com https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/

You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 79. 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 doing great. Today, I speak with double bass player Ira Gold, and I don't even know where to begin to describe the amount of wisdom you'll find in what he shares with us. Ira is a member of the National Symphony Orchestra since 2005 and a double bass faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory since 2009. Prior to this, he performed with several American orchestras, such as the Minnesota Orchestra,

and played as guest principal bassist with the San Francisco Symphony and Detroit Symphony. In addition to teaching at Peabody, Ira maintains a studio of private students. He's taught in the National Symphony Orchestra Youth Fellowship Program, and he spends his summers teaching at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, Bass Works at Peabody, and DC Bass. An active chamber musician, Ira also performs for multiple concert series and festivals. In this inspiring and motivating conversation, Ira tells us about the importance of making conscious decisions when dedicating ourselves to a musical career, of being mindful of the information that is available to us and how we can apply it to nurture our long-term goals,

and how being teachable is a crucial quality in a music student. He also talks about the new metrics he uses to define success and gives us extremely valuable practice tips. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I have. Let's go to the show. Ira Gold, so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Ira, you have a really interesting journey and you do so many things that cover so many aspects of our profession. You have a position in a fantastic orchestra. You do some soloing, a lot of teaching. So you do a little bit of everything. And I'd love for the listeners to get to know you a little bit more. So can you please tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to where you are today? Sure. Thank you. I think the things that I do that you mentioned are kind of a reflection of my passions. And from a very young age, you know, as I started playing music, I tend to kind of get into one aspect of what we're doing and then kind of follow it as far as I can.

So from a young age, it was mostly about learning how to play an instrument and developing the performance aspect of things. And as I've gotten older, you know, teaching and sort of giving back the things that you learned when you were younger kind of became more important to me. So I think that's why I've sort of seen in this chapter of my life now, I'm almost 40, that sort of serving the community and helping others kind of come along the same path has become at least equal, if not more vital to my sort of passion going forward with what I'm doing. And so, you know, when I was a kid, I played Suzuki violin and did that for years and kind of wasn't like super, super dedicated to it. But clearly I had some talent and I grew up in a musical family. My parents were violinists by their education all through their childhood and into their college years. And my dad has been a luthier owning a violin shop for many years. So I kind of grew up like sort of amongst music in my house and then sort of by default through the violin shop.

And then my siblings were playing instruments at some point and I was playing instruments. So there's just always music going on. And, you know, later when I picked up the bass, which was in middle school, it still was sort of like I had some talent for it, but I wasn't like super dedicated to it in terms of where is this going to go? and something just kind of clicked around high school and I kind of just turned a switch for myself and just decided okay I have some talent with this I haven't fully invested in it and let's just see what happens if I do that so it was almost a challenge to myself to see that if I were to take this thing that I had already dedicated a lot of time to because I started violin when I was three and by this point I'm like 14 15 years old I'm like well I've been playing music for most of

my life you know what if I really take this further so the last couple years of high school it got serious and you know it was in youth orchestras and taking private lessons and doing the sort of standard fare that most most students do at that age doing some competitions going to some summer festivals and starting to get more serious and went to Tanglewood for their high school program and, you know, just sort of made this conscious choice that I was going to go to college for music and sort of pursue a career. And it was mostly sort of designed around the reality that as a classical double bass player, if I was going to see this through to the end, I was probably going to do the orchestra path. That was sort of what I saw as the path that I

was most, um, connected to and felt really drawn to as a bass player. And I've always loved playing in orchestra. I mean, the first time I played in orchestra and like a regional orchestra and all state group, you know, whatever it was, if it was a Beethoven symphony or Tchaikovsky or something, I was just sort of taken by, you know, this really large team making this like incredible collection of sound. And, you know, if you had a really good conductor, you know, they would inspire you and so i was just sort of drawn into the whole thing and you know went to college and studied at boston university and then went on to rice university and you know basically every year and every step along the way i kept kind of getting more and more sure of what i had been

thinking about from the beginning like okay this is the right thing i'm on the right path i just got to keep you know listening and taking advice and and following the road and and you know everything kind of worked out as they say for me in the sense that a month after I finished my master's degree at Rice you know I joined the National Symphony in Washington DC and have been living here playing and teaching for I guess that's about 15 years now so you know I kind of feel like the whole journey was you know it was classic in the sense that I studied music and I went to school and you know now I'm a professional but I had to kind of make a decision at some point And I think that that was like the real key moment for me, like as a 15 year old to be

able to say, I'm going to do this and I'm going to put everything into it and I'm going to practice more than anybody else. And I'm going to listen and I'm going to go to concerts and I'm going to push myself. And I just kind of went all in and I'm glad that I did because, you know, now I'm sort of enjoying the benefits of that. the fact that now I'm able to sort of step back and kind of find my way forward now that I'm sort of like on the other side of that journey. But it's interesting, like looking at students now that are going through the same thing and trying to offer sound advice, because not everybody

makes that kind of risky slash, you know, strong decision at that age. You know, some kids go to college, they go to master's degree, and they still are not quite sure if they want to do this. And that's OK. I think that that's that's fine. But so I try to sort of look at how I went through it and and offer things that are helpful without saying, well, you've got to commit, you've got to make a decision. Each person is sort of in their own unique journey, and it's important to consider all the factors, what they're bringing to the table. So anyways, that's kind of a little bit of how I got here. And now I'm teaching at the Peabody Conservatory and playing the orchestra. Obviously, we're in a little bit of a hiatus with the state of orchestras right now, but it's been an enjoyable career at this point. And I'm hoping to continue to do these things for a long time. I think it's such a an important message for especially all young musicians to hear the fact that you really made this decision and as you said you went all in I loved when you said you know I'm going to practice more than everybody and I'm going to go to concert

and that you just kind of identified the things that could really help you develop in this way and did it such a great example of first of all not just going with the flow but actually taking it you know making a conscious decision of where you wanted your life to go and then acting on it to see it through i think it's really really inspiring path thanks i mean it's there's no right answer about what to do along the way you know you get a lot of advice from teacher so go to this festival study these pieces you know practice this many hours here's how to do this i mean everybody has information and um you kind of have to try to figure out what information you think is really powerful and valuable to you that's going to help you get to whatever the next

stage is and i i kind of i think one of one of my traits or skills is that i tend to identify things that I think are going to help me move to the next stage and I've always kind of had that like whether it's targeting a certain teacher or a certain festival or a certain thing that's like currently not in my orbit and I kind of go towards it and try to connect with it in some way and then once I connect with that then I kind of it becomes part of my language and the way I do things and then I move through that and then on to the next thing and it just seems like every teacher and every musical experience i had was always sort of the right thing that i needed at that moment and it was always the right thing that was also preparing me for the next step

and sort of being really mindful of that while you're going through it i think keeps you like in this learning and kind of growing mindset i've been talking with one of my my teachers from high school and he's always talking about that like being in a growth mindset of not saying like oh i know everything now but always saying like what else can i learn how many other ways are there to do this um how do you do it you know oh i didn't think of it that way oh that's interesting okay i'm i'm gonna try that next time that kind of thing it just it just makes you more open to all the different technical and artistic possibilities that you can create you know as a technician and as an artist so i think those are it's just a good mindset to be in because

there is a lot of exciting things all around us you know it's just a matter of whether we're paying attention exactly because you said that you always were in the context you know you heard the right thing at the right time but maybe also part of it is that you were the right student in the right mindset to hear the message that's being delivered yeah i mean even today i was teaching a student who's super talented one of my Peabody students and we were just talking about practicing and I gave him some advice on how to break things down and at the end of that conversation he just sort of paused and said you know everything you're telling me is all the things that I've heard from lots of different people but it's stuff that I need a gentle reminder on sometimes and I think

that for me I tended to be the kind of student like if a teacher said you know you really need to go look at this in this way i would just like go do it i wouldn't even be like oh yeah that's interesting okay i'll do that next week it was sort of like oh wow they just said to practice it this way i'm gonna go try that i was very like eager to try to absorb the information right away because i was like oh that's really valuable i need to i need to be able to do that if i can't do that then i'm not going to be able to play it this way or to express myself and so now on the other side, I'm trying to sort of help students not miss out on that opportunity to be also aware of the information that they're getting, because there is a lot of information and you have to kind

of filter through it all the time. I hope that all of my students hear what you just said, you know, you have to absorb the information right away. And it's actually a good reminder for me too. So many times in life, you hear great advice and it's what you say, you don't take action on it right away. And then it just gets put on a figurative shelf somewhere and it gathers dust there. So this is so important to hear. Right. Yeah. You've mentioned some passions. You talked about moving forward. What does that look like to you right now? What are some of these passions or those things that you're looking forward to accomplishing? I tend to ask myself that a lot. And I think that there are always going to be certain specific goals like, oh, I'd love to play this piece or I'd love to visit this city and play in this concert hall or it'd be great to play with this orchestra or it'd be great to, you know, meet this famous musician and hear them perform.

I mean, there's, you could list a lot of specific things about like, oh, I've never been through this experience, or I've never seen this, I want to do that. But I think those are the kinds of things that I used to use as like the gauges for whether I'm accomplishing things or whether I'm getting where I need to get. And I think now because I'm in such a like service and sort of giving part of my life now, you know, it's like I serve the orchestra as a musician. It's part of the team, you know, the 100 piece orchestra. And like I serve my students and help them move forward. And, you know, I have a family. I have young children. My wife and I have two girls. And it just seems like so much of what I'm doing is, it's not about me anymore, even though I am still like carrying myself with all the things that I've experienced. So I find myself right now, and especially now during the pandemic, where things are sort of shifted around in terms of our opportunities, I'm just sort of like trying to quiet down.

and um i'm i'm definitely functioning differently now than i ever have because i've always been very ambitious and very driven and wanting to sort of like i said go through the next hurdle and find the next challenge and right now i'm just trying to sort of listen to my inner voice and my inner voice just keeps telling me to like be steady and to um just show up and be ready for anything so it's like right now I don't have any specific musical goals like oh I need to play this piece I mean between all my students I have like 20 students right now there's a lot of repertoire being played and I feel like right now it's more important for me to sort of be able to offer things in that capacity than to sort of have my own stuff right now and I know I will I'll get to

that I mean I played a recital last year you know before all this changed and I'm sure I'll play recitals again. But I'm kind of just taking a deep breath right now and kind of just almost trying to look at my life slightly outside of it and just sort of take it in a little bit and be like, wow, look at where things are right now. And I think I've never really done that. I think the pandemic kind of has helped me to really see things a little bit from an outsider's view. and I think what I'm finding is that I've done so much in my life you know accomplished a lot traveled the world with the orchestra many tours played with all the greatest conductors and soloists and I think it's right now I'm just trying to sort of like enjoy that and sort of

savor those memories and and kind of process it and be kind of mindful of it because I think if you're constantly driving towards the next thing it's kind of hard to really like in yoga they say like be present and breathe and listen it's kind of hard to do those things if you're only looking to the future so i'm kind of gonna just see how those things unfold but i don't have a specific answer um i think i'm just kind of enjoying my role right now as being of service to others and it feels good because i have a lot to give you know i have a lot of thoughts and a lot of experiences and a lot of musical ideas that i'm happy to share and in fact i kind of believe strongly that you know you shouldn't hold on to that stuff there's a famous quote called don't

die with the music still inside you and i heard that through someone who was quoting somebody else but the idea is like give it away you know don't hold on to it yes i love this mentality again a great reminder for all of us ira when you and i were discussing this conversation you sent me some really fabulous suggestions of things you'd like to talk about you've sent me a little list and I was hoping that you and I could go through it because it sounds really interesting and very applicable. So you're talking about deconstructing and reconstructing, and I'd love to hear about that a little bit. Okay. So I think, you know, when I think of sort of breaking things down and putting things back together, which is my sort of

my main default way I tend to try to solve problems, it kind of depends on the context. everything is based on what's going on is it a fast piece or a slow piece is it lyrical or is it more rhythmic is it you know a passage where you have a constant running notes or is it something where you're hopping around and jumping around so i mean these things that we're going to talk about of course can they're all kind of contextualized and um you know they can change depending on what you're working on but i i think it's easier for people to do these kinds of things when you have like a very clear block of notes so let's say you're playing an orchestra passage or something in a concerto or sonata and there's just like constant 16th notes or say you're

working on you know a bach violin solo piece or bach cello suite or something like that you just have a bunch of notes in a row you know this kind of taking things apart and putting it back together it's easy because you can see the groupings there and the thing is students they tend to do what they see and with the music is on the page and they are saying oh i'm working on this passage where they say oh i'm going to play this for you they tend to just look at the page and they start playing everything and i've just been finding as the years go on that i just keep saying to the students over and over and over i'm like you don't have to do everything all the time. I just keep saying that. You don't have to do everything all the time. And what that

means is, based on whatever your challenge is, if it's a shifting issue, or a string crossing problem, or a coordination issue, or something isn't in tune, or it's not clean, or your down bows and up bows don't match, part of the challenge within the challenge is to try to identify first what the issue is, and then to try to create an exercise or a game that's going to target that problem and so I often will hear students and when I see whatever the issue is I'll say okay we're only going to do these downbows right now or we're only going to do the shift or we're only going to work on the string crossing and then we'll sometimes even go even deeper into that and isolate something within the isolation and almost every single time that happens a couple things

happen one the student really feels better because they feel like what we're creating is easier it's something they can manage and control and so they build confidence so it's not just that they can do it and it sounds better but they're also like believing in themselves when you play a lot of notes and you're trying to do a good job and you get sort of like a c- run through it's like yeah it's okay there's a lot of emotional baggage that comes with also whatever the honest answer is of like is that passage even working so it's like students can feel doubly weighted in terms of well i'm struggling with this piece because it's difficult and now i feel bad because like i don't know if i can do it the next time i play through it so we try to sort of figure

out how we can break things down you know in bass repertoire if we're working on excerpts um you know a lot of the stuff is by the standard composers like mozart beethoven brahm strass folks like that and a lot of the passage work tends to be technical and tends to be challenging so these pieces are almost ripe and perfectly designed for us to do this kind of work so sometimes if there's a sea of notes i'll just tell them okay just play the first note of every measure or just the first note of every beat and and sometimes they can't do it because they're like so surprised by the simplicity of it that they're hard wiring that they've been doing in their practice it's just like never they've just never tried that and so there's like this little

glitch in their sort of central computer where they almost go wait hold on that's it's almost more difficult for them at first but then they sort of find like oh yeah that's right that is how that works out and then they're able to sort of build on that so the reconstructing and deconstructing is sort of like it's a concept and it can get specific in terms of you know how many notes are you going to play at a time you know you have to sort of evaluate what you can handle at that moment but it really helps to build like a sense of trust and coordination so that when you do go back to play what the composer has on the page it's almost like you are the composer and you built it through you deconstructed it and then now you put it back together and it almost feels

like the student wrote the notes you know because they're sort of putting all those layers together and then they have the final product rather than trying to keep shining and polishing the whole thing all the time so I mean it's it's a little different than the way I used to primarily work because I think I was someone who could kind of do both things at the same time I could do chunks and I could polish at the same time when I was working on things when I was younger but I don't think everybody you know learns and processes the same way so i'm almost kind of reacting to what's in front of me you know so it's that's kind of like sort of the a very long answer to your question no this is great all of these details are awesome and i really like what you

talk about in terms of not just building the passage learning the notes but at the same time really enhancing our confidence and how that translates later in playing the passage more successfully i really love that what about adding and subtracting so i was saying something to some students last week that when the music is very difficult and there's like a lot to do it's complex maybe it's a lot of notes maybe it's really fast maybe there's a lot of dynamic changes maybe there's accents maybe the composer has put a lot of information in the way that i like to practice that kind of situation is to reduce things down to something that's simple so like solo bach is like a perfect example of that like you can kind of find the harmonic movements and

the certain downbeats and certain chords and things so you can sort of just play those places and if you play those notes throughout you know a couple lines of music it still almost kind of sounds like the piece um and then i sort of take the opposite approach which is if you're playing something that's very simple and where things are spaced out very easily i sometimes will add things in order to either like maybe fill in something rhythmic so you know if there's a passage like an abram symphony that has like a dotted rhythm and we're going i will go in and like fill it in and go what that does is it students don't always internalize subdivisions so we try to like

externalize them by playing them and then by that process they are actually hearing their external creation of that rhythm and then eventually you can take it out and go back to what Brahms wrote so it's kind of like I'm really now in this place in my teaching where I'm just very focused on opposites so it's like okay this passage is slurred well let's work on it separate bowing and then they play it separate like oh god so much easier I'm like yeah that's because you're worried about the bow tracking and your bow speed and you're stressed out about that and you're not able to deal with the left hand so now let's play it separate bows and then suddenly you see like this cloud lifting over their head where they're like oh okay I can play it now and then the

opposite if the passage is separate and they're just slogging away sometimes we have them do a slur and then they kind of their body relaxes and they're like oh yeah this is a lot easier so it's kind of like whatever you think is in front of you try looking at it from a different perspective whether it's the opposite or slightly altered adding things subtracting things just sort of try to get it you know again back to that what's the issue how are you going to challenge yourself to come up with with a plan and you know at this point I just like try all kinds of things with students that um it's it's like kind of it's like funny sometimes trying to like decide what I'm actually going to use but um but it's it's becoming easier to sort of target things because

like I said when I was working on things I was very intuitive and so I would just sort of like even if i could say out loud what the problem was i sort of think it and feel it and now i have to kind of be more verbal and have to like actually have the conversation with the students and they have to tell me and i have to talk with them and we we really share the experience of okay well how are we gonna how are we gonna get this to work so um yeah the adding subtracting thing is really valuable and again it's sort of based on the context of the music that sort of helps us to determine what are we going to add or what are we going to take away but it's all designed to try to have a more detailed relationship with the music you know yes yes i love everything that

you say especially you know in terms of creative practice and you've used one of my favorite question earlier because the you know keeping this beginner's mind is such a big mindset in the way I teach and you said you know asking yourself what else that's one of my favorite question when I practice and when I teach what else can I see what else can I try for sure and another thing that I really love is what you just talked about which is kind of related to the next question I wanted to ask you about where the musical ideas come from this was also one of your suggestions which i think is excellent and um you were telling me about how to bring life experiences to your art and i really love this question uh can you expand on that a little bit

more sure so again it's it's kind of playing on this duality thing it's kind of a theme in my life and in my just everything that as a person and what i choose to do i'm always kind of it's like those like ropes they have on the side of the wrestling ring where they kind of go back and forth sometimes i sometimes swing to opposite extremes to try to understand what my boundaries are um and at one point i think on some other interview i did i talked about life is about extremes and i meant emotional extremes i think it's the same thing with um with when you're creating your music and that um you know nothing is in a vacuum so it isn't that you go in the practice room and you just practice this piece by yourself and you just learn how to play it in

tune and you know put the metronome on and then you walk out of the practice room you're like all right i can now play the sonata i mean that might be true in some sense that like you've done some work within that context but you know everything that you are and are experiencing in your life is being given to that situation so you know the experience you have you know what have you learned in your life what age are you what kind of relationships do you have you know what have you seen in the world you know you know have you you know i don't know visited other cultures and met different types of people and seeing things different than what was on your street when you're growing up you know i mean i think like every experience is really important to sort of help

shape us in terms of what do we want to say when we play music and and like because i think music is the ultimate language that shows all those different emotional extremes I think that you know your technique kind of helps build your work ethic and so I kind of think of like playing an instrument well it kind of is like if I could translate well how does that translate to life it'd be like you know being you know going to work every day at the same time and committing to i show up at the same time and i clock in and i do my work and i serve the business or the company and when i do what i'm supposed to do and i follow through and i put in the hours and i'm just in the flow of doing that and over time you build experience and you build trust and commitment and

your co-workers expect that you're going to show up the next day and do the same thing so i feel like with your instrument if you say i'm a violinist or i play trumpet it and you take it out every day and you commit that time to it you're kind of saying this is this is something that I believe in this is something that I commit to every day it's a part of my life it's an extension of my you know embracing the world around me but that's just sort of like the showing up part and so I feel like when you say where the musical ideas come from I feel like that's like what happens in your life you know it's like what happens when you show up you know who do you meet what kind of conversations do you have what kind of food are you eating you

know what are you watching on tv what kind of books are you reading um you know where are you traveling to um what's happening i mean we all have the highs and lows we we we meet new people we lose people we live in different cities we go through all different types of weather changes throughout the year i mean right now we're going through this like really powerful experience with this you know sort of world crisis it's it's it's affecting us you know it's affecting how we feel about ourselves and and everybody around us and and that mindset and how you feel about that certainly gets brought to your music you know and um and i think like when i was younger i was very passionate about music and i had ideas in my head and i wanted to get those ideas across but i didn't

have the life experience yet and so now it's sort of like the life experience sort of confirms the ideas that i was curious about when i was younger like oh what would it be like to be in love and what would it be like to travel and you know walk up to the eiffel tower and just like stare at and be like whoa you know or to walk the great wall of china or you know to go for a run in oman you know on the on the water and there's all kinds of things that i've experienced in my life that they just sort of they give me ideas to bring to the music so if i'm playing something and the music is has a certain kind of character or has a certain kind of rhythm to it or has a certain tempo or has a certain aesthetic i can draw from my life and say yeah yeah i know what that feels

like i can put that into the sound okay i'm not getting the sound i want why am i not getting the sound i want and what happens is all the technical jargon and all the terminology and all the things that we learn about how to play our instrument and all the life experiences they start moving towards each other and then they end up kind of overlapping and they become this one thing and you know that's sort of the beauty of being a musician and sort of functioning in the world is they end up kind of becoming the same language but you have to kind of allow them to come together so there's a funny story i was giving a master class many years ago and a student played for me in the master class and they played a concerto and it sounded beautiful and we worked together

and then after the class we were just sort of chatting and they said you know just i really feel like i'm hitting the wall with this piece because you know i'll be practicing late at night in the practice room and you know it's like 11 o'clock it's midnight and i'm you know playing these passages over and over again i just i just don't know what to do with the piece like what what do you what do you think about that and i was like okay so the way you're describing the situation the inspiration and the passion is not going to come when you're locked in a practice room like isolated from all the different life experiences you could be having now maybe at that point you should just go to sleep or something you know who knows but it's like when you're alone by

yourself in a room and it's quiet it's very very hard to come up with ideas so i basically like turned it around on him and i was like okay so where are you going to find the character and and the musicality that you want in this piece it's not in that practice room it's out there in the world go find it you know and he sort of looked at me like with a funny look but kind of like yeah i think i think i will try that and it's that's kind of like the example of when you say where do musical ideas come from you know you can have them in the practice room when it's quiet if you've brought it from outside the practice room yeah so it's like you have to you almost have to be a collector of information and and experiences in order to hold them and then be

able to then decide how you're going to place them into the music i i love it especially coming from someone whose teacher the teacher i studied with for the longest time he was actually a guest on the podcast. And I forget the number of the episode, but his name is Jean-Francois Rivet. And his big thing is to be a complete artist, you need to fuel your life with experiences. So he's someone who would always encourage all his students to read amazing literature, eat amazing food, travel, go to concerts, go to the theater, you know, I mean, like the, not the movie theater, but the real theater. And just constantly encouraging all of his students to really live in order to like fill these buckets of experience and emotions. And I have so many fantastic

memories of trying the spiciest food I've ever eaten with him. And him really wanted me to experience this. He took some of his students out to this Thai restaurant. I think it was Thai and just trying the spiciest dish on the menu just so we would have tried it, you know. So I completely agree with you on that. I just want to add one thing about that, which is that, you know, I was the kind of person that I would lock myself in the practice room

and practice many hours when I was young because, you know, you sort of feel like you're on borrowed time. You hear a lot of things like, oh, you know, you're only going to be a student once and once you're 24 or 25 and you graduate from school you go out into the world you're on your own you know and so i think i felt like i had about 10 years you know between when i again i made that conscious choice to go all in it's like i was like okay i got 10 years to do this so i gotta work really hard um and you know i did have life

experiences i went to festivals i you know i got to play with lots of great musicians all along the way um and there was some traveling there were there were there were some natural occurrences that that happened as I went through that process but I think now I'm more consciously choosing it yeah and maybe it's easier to do that because I have these you know wonderful jobs and I have the opportunity to be able to step back from it I think that's the that's the conundrum that I think young people face is you know should I practice this for this master class I'm playing in tomorrow you know for 30 more minutes or should I go to that recital and go see that string quartet play You know, should I read this book this week or should I, you know, do a couple more scale routines?

You know, it's it's there is no right answer about what you should do. But I think you have to experiment. And for some people, they maybe need to spend more time working on themselves and developing their craft. And for other people, they might be overdoing it. You know, there's plenty of pianists who practice so many more hours than other instrumentalists. instrumentalists and i think we need to be careful not to say oh my pianist friend is practicing eight hours a day so i'll do that um you know each instrument kind of has a different capacity for what's healthy and what's going to be able to be sustainable and certainly as i've gotten older i i'm much more mindful of the number of hours i'm spending with the instrument you know sort of in

totality whether it's teaching you know rehearsing performing um you know the human body can only do so much so exactly you gotta be careful and you know i think there's also another kind of life experience which is when you don't plan to go to a concert or you don't plan to read an amazing book and you think i need to practice and then you do not practice so i think what you're advocating is not to just waste the time but utilize it well so i think that this is sometimes something that I see around which is students will feel like well I don't have time to go to the concert but that time is also not filled with something that could be very inspiring or fulfilling nor is it filled with practice it just ends up being filled with you know a little bit of

a waste of time so when you say we're on borrowed time I think that we need to consider a little bit more to make sure that you know we we have this high quality resting time and we do plan fulfilling enriching life experiences that is actually something that contributes greatly to our music making experience yeah absolutely i mean when i said the borrowed time i meant you know that was something that i was just carrying around because i thought that that was how i needed to think about things and now my mindset is well you have your whole life to get better yes but when yeah when you're you know investing money in school and you're paying to study and you're you know you're putting resources into your education there is a feeling

behind that of well something needs to come out on the other side of this and i don't want to like finish the degree and feel like i didn't do everything i could to make the best of the situation i'm constantly telling my students all the time like the college students i say i miss being a student in college because it's like it's like this oasis and sort of garden of eden of information it's like you have the library and you have all these incredible faculty concerts and student performances and like it's just it's like it's its own universe and it's all right there for you and sometimes the students are just like partying or they're just hanging out and doing whatever and you know that's an important part of social development too but it's like man there's

all these like amazing things happening like go to all of it you know because once it's over you know you're just going to look back and be like did i take advantage of those opportunities and you can't literally go to everything but i think you can have that intention of like really trying to soak up and be a sponge um rather than well you know i don't have time for that i need to go like you know do this other thing that maybe doesn't have to be done that day Yeah. Ira, how about a round of rapid fire questions before I let you go? Sure. What is a habit that you have and that you think contributed to your success? I think that probably I'm a very big goal setter. And I think that even if I don't accomplish the

goal I'm very dedicated and devoted to the process of accomplishing a goal and because I'm so passionate about that commitment even if I don't get where I need to with that specific goal something else shows up at the end of that process and almost every single time I've set a goal for something as simple as I'm going to learn this piece or I want to go to this festival or I want to study with this teacher or I would love to get into this orchestra or I want to win this competition any kind of specific goal that I would go after even if it would be like 10 things in a row that wouldn't work out there would be something right next to it that was of equal value that was standing right there when I got to the end of my journey it's like okay I want to be in this

orchestra well maybe you didn't win that job but you won this other job or I really want to study with this person so you audition for that school yeah you don't get in you're on the waiting list but then you get into this other school you study with this other amazing teacher it's like you go down the list and it's kind of like the the goal is sort of like it's the structure you live in that sort of pushes you forward and you just become a better version of yourself at the end of that and so i think that that's kind of the way i've always lived my life it's why i'm like so dedicated to running now and sort of training for races and stuff because it's kind of the same thing as being a musician you have to kind of plan these very long

term training plans and you've got to be patient every day and you've kind of got to work through the challenges um it's it's totally different than being like i'm going to go buy a lottery ticket and hope that i hit hit the jackpot today it's sort of like all right i'm going to do this for 18 weeks and every day there's going to be a specific challenge that gets me to the event of the day um it's kind of that's what we do as musicians too what an amazing answer i love it what skills do you think i mean we've already mentioned a few but what skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments well because when i was studying i was very centered on my own playing and my own development

of my craft i wasn't thinking so much about teaching until i was probably in graduate school probably late undergrad and then grad i started really thinking about yeah i think that i i think i might be interested in teaching and so that is an example what i would say is that i put teaching under the umbrella of service you know it's about giving back and helping others i think that you know when you decide to be a musician and you study there is a lot of self-care and self-reflection and a lot of um you have to be a little selfish sometimes to develop your own skills and to go as far as you're going to take yourself but i would just sort of again like we were talking about with the practice what if we look at the other side of it i think students need to make

sure that while they're acting in their own best interest don't forget about others because you never know if the person you're sitting next to in orchestra or in class or at a festival could end up being your you know ceo of your arts organization or they might end up being you know your neighbor across the street like 30 years from now you just don't really know what your relationship is going to be like with people and i think that if you are developing that sense of community and service towards others even while you are like driving towards your own goals what you're doing is you're allowing the possibility that when you're older you'll be open and ready for some other type of commitment other than just accomplishing the things that you

want to accomplish for your own life and i think that's for whatever reason i kind of left that sort of part of myself always open and i didn't know what was going to fill it and certainly it became filled with teaching but it was sort of like i had this little part of me that was always like ready to even i remember even in boston i would be like practicing and some student would knock on my door and they'd be maybe a couple years younger than me and they would just say i'm just having problems with this passage can you help me and that was sort of the beginning of me realizing wow people are seeking me out because they think i have some answers why do they think i have answers there's something about how i'm carrying myself and how i'm playing

and sort of living day to day that that it's giving them this vibe of like i think ira can help me and i mean that must have been the reason and it's sort of like they would just keep coming to me and asking for suggestions i was like sort of giving these younger students lessons just because we were all hanging out in the same part of the you know music building and i think for whatever reason I left that part of myself open to be filled and so I would say that I think we need to be mindful of that while we're moving through the stages of development yes I love that and as you're talking I am looking at the picture of this quote from Itzhak Perlman this is when you teach you learn and I could not agree more with you

how about a favorite tool in the practice room i have to say that because i tend to be i'm very strong with listening and i'm very strong with with my eyes the visual aspect of things and i think the mirror has always been something that i always go back to it's it's a little bit of a dangerous thing to say okay the mirror is really important because you can become too dependent on it and certainly when we perform we don't have mirrors on stage hopefully we don't um but there is something to this reflection that you get back all the time about what does your body look like when you're playing you know especially for the bass it's it's a large instrument and we have to be full body to play it um so every single thing

that you see that's going on when you play is information that helps you to understand if you have tension if you do have tension where and then why is that tension there you know trying to understand um not just what it looks like but what's going on underneath and i i feel like the mirror has just always been something that i come back to um you have periods where you you know use it more often than you should but i think it's it's something that i always kind of come back to and helps me to remember what i want to feel like and what i want to um experience when i'm playing my instrument so i can you know optimize my movements and and and feel good you know because i want to be able to i want to feel good while i'm playing for the rest of my

life i don't want to lose that sense of comfort you know while i'm continuing to you know age and finally how about a quick actionable tip that the listeners could implement today in their practice lives or in the practice room or their musical lives so i've been talking to some some folks about this this summer and you know i kind of said that the pandemic was an opportunity for us to you know i talked about earlier about stepping away and kind of like viewing your life sort of the same way it would be like i've often when i was really young i wanted to be an astronaut and i thought it would be really cool to be like outside of the earth and just floating in outer space and see the earth not being on the earth like i always

was like wow that is the ultimate in sort of getting outside of things like really you know and there's only a few people who have ever been able to experience that i mean it's it's a handful of people that circle the globe right and so i think it's the same thing with um what's going on right now which is that we were so busy just running around and playing concerts and living our lives and running to the grocery store and getting our dry cleaning and doing everything that like there's probably lots of things that we're passionate about that we couldn't do because we're like well i don't have time to do that and so once everything sort of simmered down you know march april may we got into the summer it's like people weren't going to festivals people were at

home you know things were quieting down and when when i would have conversations with students or or my friends colleagues i would say well this is the time to like learn that concerto that you've been wanting to learn this is that time to learn a language or read that book or watch that movie or or give yourself a challenge say i want to see if i can get through these etude books over the next year i want to see if i can you know i don't know learn you know all the symphonies by so-and-so composer or something but like try something um and for me it just sort of happened that it wasn't a musical thing but you know like I said before I'm a runner and I've been sort of running every day for a while now and it just sort of I took on this challenge that I didn't even

know I was taking on where I just started running every day and now tomorrow is going to be day 100 and it just sort of started as this idea like what happens if I try to start running every day and and I don't know where this is going to lead I'm sort of taking it as I go but you know the same thing with with music it's like what if you just start trying something you haven't done before and see where it takes you you might be surprised how it will benefit your life so i think that's something that we can all do right now um that can just help us to sort of pad and further enhance all the other things that we're already that we were already holding on to this is a great reflection. Ira, thank you so much for coming on the show, for giving us so much insight and

food for thought. And I really appreciate you being here. Thank you. I really enjoy your show and I'm very grateful for you to have me here. thank you guys so much for listening i hope you enjoyed this chat with ira gold and if you did please share with a friend you think might benefit from ira's insight and knowledge personally i want to emphasize the point ira makes about making the conscious decision of seriously dedicating oneself to a musical education and how key this decision to commitment is. To say, I'm going to do this. I will be dedicated. I will be open to the knowledge and advice I receive. I will apply what I learn. I will push myself and I'm going to go all in. And Ira

demonstrated perfectly what I was talking about in the last episode in my conversation with Trevor Jones. And if you haven't checked out episode 78 yet, I hope you download it and listen to it. And it's this importance of being teachable, of taking ownership and maximizing our learning experience by being curious, by taking the advice, following it, absorbing it, and working with it until it becomes part of us, until it becomes an ingrained skill or knowledge. Now, I would love to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation were. So get in touch with me. I'm Mind Over Finger on both Instagram and Facebook and share your thoughts on those

topics. As always, I'll have all the information related to this episode in the show notes and you can find them via your podcast app or by visiting mindoverfinger.com where you can also find more information about mindful and efficient practice, performance preparation, or how to work with me. While you're there, sign up for my newsletter and receive your free guide to a super productive mindful practice using the metronome. Finally, I hope to see you in the Mind Over Finger tribe. That's my private Facebook group where I pop in once a week to talk about mindful practice and answer your questions. It's a great community and you can find it at

facebook.com slash groups slash mind over finger tribe. So that's it for today. Again, thank you.