One of the things that differentiates violin training from training in other areas—soccer, for example, or algebra—is that the set of skills expected of a violinist is quite standardized, as are many of the instruction techniques. Because most violin techniques are decades or even centuries old, the field has had the chance to zero in on the proper or “best” way to hold the violin, to move the hand during vibrato, to move the bow during spiccato, and so on. The various techniques may not be easy to master, but a student can be shown exactly what to do and how to do it.
All this means is that the violin students at the Universität der Künste Berlin offered a near-perfect opportunity to test the role that motivation plays in developing expert performance and, more generally, to identify what differentiates good performers from the very best.
To look for these differences, we interviewed each of the thirty student violinists in our study in great detail. We asked them about their musical histories—when they started studying music, who their teachers were, how many hours a week they spent in solitary practice at each age, what competitions they’d won, and so on. We asked them for their opinions on how important various activities were in improving their performance—practicing alone, practicing in a group, playing alone for fun, playing in a group for fun, performing solo, performing in a group, taking lessons, giving lessons, listening to music, studying music theory, and so on. We asked them how much effort these various activities required and how much immediate pleasure they got while they were doing them. We asked them to estimate how much time they’d spent on each of these activities during the previous week. Finally, because we were interested in how much time they’d spent on practice over the years, we asked them to estimate, for each year since they’d started to practice music, how many hours per week on average they had spent in solitary practice.
The thirty music students were also asked to keep daily diaries for each of the next seven days in which they would detail exactly how they’d spent their time. In the diaries, they recorded their activities in fifteen-minute increments: sleeping, eating, going to class, studying, practicing alone, practicing with others, performing, and so on. When they were done we had a detailed picture of how they’d spent their days as well as a very good idea of their practice histories.
The students from all three groups gave similar answers to most of our questions. The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice was the most important factor in improving their performance, followed by such things as practicing with others, taking lessons, performing (particularly in solo performance), listening to music, and studying music theory. Many of them also said that getting enough sleep was very important to their improvement. Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep—and often an afternoon nap.
One of our most significant findings was that most factors the students had identified as being important to improvement were also seen as labor-intensive and not much fun; the only exceptions were listening to music and sleeping. Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn’t enjoy the work they did to improve. In short, there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.
The other crucial finding was that there was only one major difference among the three groups. This was the total number of hours that the students had devoted to solitary practice.
Using the students’ estimates of how many hours a week they’d practiced alone since they’d begun playing the violin, we calculated the total number of hours they’d spent practicing alone until age eighteen, the age at which they typically entered the music academy. Although memories are not always reliable, dedicated students of this sort generally set aside fixed periods to practice each day on a weekly schedule—and they do this beginning very early on in their music training—so we thought it likely that their retrospective estimates of how much time they had spent practicing at various ages would be relatively accurate.
We found that the best violin students had, on average, spent significantly more time than the better violin students had spent, and that the top two groups—better and best—had spent much more time on solitary practice than the music-education students. Specifically, the music-education students had practiced an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they were eighteen, the better violin students had practiced an average of 5,301 hours, and the best violin students had practiced an average of 7,410 hours. Nobody had been slacking—even the least accomplished of the students had put in thousands of hours of practice, far more than anyone would have who played the violin just for fun—but these were clearly major differences in practice time.
Looking more closely, we found that the largest differences in practice time among the three groups of students had come in the preteen and teenage years. This is a particularly challenging time for young people to keep up their music practice because of the many interests that compete for their time—studying, shopping, hanging out with friends, partying, and so on. Our results indicated that those preteens and teens who could maintain and even increase their heavy practice schedule during these years ended up in the top group of violinists at the academy.
We also calculated estimated practice times for the middle-aged violinists working at the Berlin Philharmonic and the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and we found that the time they had spent practicing before the age of eighteen—an average of 7,336 hours—was almost identical to what the best violin students in the music academy had reported.
There were a number of factors we did not include in our study that could have influenced—and indeed probably did influence—the skill levels of the violinists in the different groups. For instance, students who were lucky enough to have worked with exceptional teachers would likely have progressed more quickly than those with teachers who were just okay.
But two things were strikingly clear from the study: First, to become an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice. We found no shortcuts and no “prodigies” who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. And, second, even among these gifted musicians—all of whom had been admitted to the best music academy in Germany—the violinists who had spent significantly more hours practicing their craft were on average more accomplished than those who had spent less time practicing.
~~Peak : Secrets From The New Science of Expertise -by- Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
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