Must you love doing the thing you love to do?

I love music. I love listening to it, playing it, writing it, rehearsing it. I love music. But I don’t always enjoy doing it. Is that normal? Let me clarify. I love to play the piano. It’s a lovely thing to play a piece that you enjoy and have known for thirty or more years and to find new meanings or new links within the piece or to revel in the colours created by the composer and the instrument. Playing the piano with another musician can be even better as you have the cut and thrust of giving way or following, or leading and asserting yourself. There’s also a gleeful (and slightly sadistic)  pleasure to be taken from pushing a tempo and feeling the slight rising anxiety as your soloist has to work a little harder than they’d expected! The piano is, in my opinion, the best of instruments and I love it.

But I don’t like practising. Yes, I know: you have to practise to improve and you should appreciate the time spent getting to know the music better. I have made this point many times when teaching and maybe this is a classic example of “practise what you preach”. Or more accurately, don’t practise what you preach. But really, it’s such a chore (and, dare I say it: sometimes a bore). I’ve always found it so. When I first started piano lessons I practised under duress: “if you don’t practise you can’t have lessons”. And so I did my fifteen minutes a day. Fifteen and no more. For years. Trust me, this is absolutely NOT enough. For the first year it might be okay but once you start working towards grade exams it is simply enough time to get through everything. But somehow it was and I did. I’m a good sight reader (through luck, not skill), I have a natural keyboard facility (more luck) and I could come back from a holiday and play better than before I left. But that just meant I didn’t have to work hard and that’s not necessarily a good thing. By the time I got to college I was probably doing somewhere between an hour or two a day. Certainly not the three or four hours that my peers managed. When I left college, I tried to practise regularly for a while but soon got out of the habit and stopped altogether.

When I finally got round to taking a diploma (I should have taken it at college while I was playing regularly but didn’t – long story…) I barely managed forty minutes a day. If your recital lasts forty minutes you need to be practising for longer! When I finally got the examiner’s report I was a little indignant that he wasn’t more bowled over by my playing. I then remembered how little preparation I’d done and decided to be pleased to have passed and finally got those coveted letters after my name. I sometimes think about taking a higher diploma but, seriously – I’m going to practise enough to give a fifty minute recital?!!

There’s a similar story with writing music. I love to get stuck into composing an original piece or arranging something for an ensemble or a pupil. There’s a real challenge to be met as you try to develop your material in a satisfying way, or do justice to the text you’re setting. When arranging music, it’s not easy to make a difficult piece accessible to or playable by young or amateur performers whilst retaining as much of the original as possible. I spent many a happy hour arranging ‘Oliver!’ and ‘Aladdin’ for pit bands whose average age was twelve. (It took hours but was worth it to see and hear the group having a ball whilst emulating a big band and to see the surprise of an audience member who hadn’t realised the cast had been singing to a live band – she thought the musicians were miming!).

But…while I’ve written about a dozen original musicals for schools (all of which have been performed) and have happy memories of them all, they sit, gathering dust, in a cupboard, never to be performed again. People have told me to publish them but I really can’t be bothered. To prepare neat scores, lyric sheets and backing tracks would be so tedious. I’d happily write a new musical given the need (and a collaborator to write the lyrics) but to revisit these old ones? It would be like writing a story at school only to have it marked and be told to “write it out in your best handwriting” (remember doing that?). Is there a more miserable task?

And therein lies the problem: I have no issue with playing the piano or composing or arranging because they are creative acts. Each performance requires an act of creative expression, of conjuring an atmosphere or a sense of excitement, mystery or tragedy. Writing a christmas carol is scarcely different from producing a watercolour or oil painting – choosing one’s colours, textures or point of focus. Arranging a piece requires the ability to work with the available resources (be it an array of instruments or a group with limited technique) and still produce something special. But practising a difficult passage is both repetitive and monotonous. Taking an existing composition and doing nothing to it other than making it legible brings no creative satisfaction: you work on a piece and, after hours of work, end up with… the same piece. Where’s the motivation? (If I were to produce a marketable edition of my musicals, could I earn money? Possibly but probably not – I’d be lousy at promoting them and probably wouldn’t put in the required effort to make it happen).

Does this make me lazy? I don’t think so. It might mean I lack self discipline or even that I’m  being a pretentious artiste.  Perhaps the Gemini in me wants to be moving onto the next new thing rather than marking time. It may also mean that I haven’t achieved/produced as much as I could have, which may be a bit of a shame. Maybe as I get older I’ll set myself goals and establish productive routines. Maybe I’ll publish that Easter choral piece and finish writing that novel.  But if I don’t,  I can’t see myself losing any sleep over it – I don’t want music to be a drudge and something to be put off. I want to always enjoy it. I want to love doing the thing I love.

Footnote: if any of my pupils ever read this article, take heed: the approach I have described above will not make you a good musician - practise makes perfect!