The Musician Insight

L.Park: Can you tell us your personal experience with intense practicing as a student and professional, and how it impacted you?

Cory Barger: As a student, it pushed me beyond my physical capabilities and led directly to several serious injuries that I still deal with more than twenty years later. I felt so much pressure to be seen as someone who was working hard, and taking things seriously, that I pushed through severe pain. I reached the point where I actually couldn’t move my thumbs at all. That’s bad news when you play the bassoon. When I was being treated for my injuries I then felt extremely guilty that I wasn’t working harder, and I felt all kinds of negative emotions about myself and my abilities. It took a really long time to free myself from that.

L.Park: We all heard the saying “work smarter, not harder”. What is your take on it and how would you explain it to your students?

Cory Barger: I’m a complete evangelist for working less. Anyone I come across, student or not, will eventually hear about how I think we work too hard. I’ll tell you a story from my first major injury period: I was in second year at university and my friends and I would usually have dinner and then go practice until the practice rooms closed at midnight. Except I couldn’t play, so I just went along for company. I brought books to read, but in the end I spent about half the time wandering the halls and snooping on what other people were doing (everyone’s worst nightmare, I know). My friends would ask me to help them solve problems, and that time really showed me that most people waste a lot of time in practice rooms. There was one guy who said he practiced for ten hours a day, but he was just down in the music building floating from room to room talking to people all day long and his breaks were far longer than any time spent playing.

That showed me that:

1. We generally aren’t that aware of where our time actually goes

2. We’re not really taking the time to assess whether what we are doing is really effective.

Once I was cleared by my doctor to start playing again, I was only allowed to play for fifteen minutes per day. And at first, that seemed like a complete waste of time. It feels like it takes fifteen minutes to get the thing out of the case sometimes. But I had to learn to be effective in that time because I had juries coming up, and I didn’t want to postpone.

And eventually I could get more done in fifteen minutes than I had before in four hours, because I was so much more deliberate. Playing things over and over again was not an option, so there went most peoples’ strategy.

So, long story short, if you don’t know what result you are going to get from a particular action, it’s probably not the most effective way to spend your time. Obviously there is a lot of experimenting that goes in to practice, but in general I think we are generally not as deliberate as we could be and waste most of our practice time for it.

L.Park: The ideal of artists fully devoting themselves to art (neglecting personal issues) is often represented as an ideal by the media. What are the long lasting impacts in your opinion?

Cory Barger: I think this has far reaching impact — our personal lives and emotional health suffer a lot, but also, we have no time to involve ourselves in our communities.
I honestly think that’s one of the reasons that attendance is so poor at concerts — when all of your friends are on stage with you, who is paying to come to the concerts? It’s glorified because of the tortured genius archetype, I think. But at the root I think it’s because society generally thinks that work has to cost you.

People look at musicians and wish that they had the talent, or training or dedication, etc, and only see the fun parts that they would like to participate in. We don’t see a lot of depictions of crying alone in practice rooms day after day (it happens, but maybe only once in the movie) and that looks like a small price to pay for a job that you “love”. So sacrificing family time and rest is seen as an appropriate tradeoff. It’s the price to pay for fulfilling work, even though a lot of time it isn’t fulfilling work, and no one wants to hear about the parts that aren’t fulfilling. No one wants to hear about artists when we need anything from society. The art should be enough to fuel us.

L.Park: Were there some things in your conservatory and/or music college education that were actually more damaging than good, and why?

Cory Barger: The workload for sure — I remember having a week with 10 concerts including my final recital and the due date for my thesis. It was weeks before the end of term, there was no reason for all of that to be expected of anyone, but it was normal. It didn’t reflect the real world, either.

Second was shame as a motivation tactic. I still have nightmares about a conductor yelling at me for getting lost in rehearsal, in front of everyone.

L.Park: Students are often anxious regarding on how they perform, whether in class or on stage, do you think that parts of it comes from the perfectionism asked from them as future professionals?

Cory Barger: Absolutely. Maybe perfection isn’t explicitly asked for, but it is often implied in the reactions of teachers and conductors when we make mistakes. We know deep down that it’s an impossible standard. It needs to be ok to make mistakes, or else our growth will be stunted.

L.Park: If there is one thing that music institutions should change, what would it be?

Cory Barger: That just because previous generations did it this way, doesn’t mean change isn’t necessary.

Actively recruiting and including marginalized students AND making the environment safe for them, It is NOT a safe educational environment when the administration hires sexual abusers because they are great players. Teaching students about how the brain actually learns, because we’ve learned so much in just the last twenty years about that that makes a lot of skill acquisition practices kind of irrelevant. Training on caring for our bodies so that we can actually do this work for more than five years.

L.Park: How does a typical day of practice look for you?

Cory Barger: A typical day doesn’t include practice for me lately! I practice once or twice a week depending on the program, and more if I have chamber music or solo projects but I am very careful of how much I play day to day and usually a three hour rehearsal is the limit. I practice on Sundays and if something else needs solving before Tuesday’s rehearsal I will do about forty-five minutes on Monday afternoon too. I haven’t needed that in a while. I’ll do maybe two hours on Sunday, but it really depends on the program. I’ll listen to a recording and read along, mark cues if I think I need them, and make note of things that I think I need to look at. Then I’ll play through those bits at a few different tempos. There will be rep that I know will be harder, but I always know what is coming up because we have the repertoire for the whole season already published. So any time something scary is coming up I will add it to the Sunday session several weeks ahead of time so that that week isn’t too heavy.

L.Park: What are the things to learn to have a fruitful practice?

Cory Barger: Learn how you learn. What helps you understand things better? What worked for your teacher isn’t necessarily going to work for you.

Be kind to yourself. Mistakes are morally neutral — they do not mean anything about you. They are information, and seeing them as information instead of a personal failure will go a long way to letting you actually learn from them. Sometimes mistakes are actually the most efficient way to learn.

Learn to estimate how long it’s going to take you to learn something.

L.Park: Failures while being a part of the process, are often seen as a reflection of our value as artists. Why do you think we regard it as such?

Cory Barger: I think teachers can have a tendency to think that their students’ failures reflect on the effectiveness of their teaching, so failure becomes much more taboo because it is “risky” for the teacher as well as the institution.

L.Park: Can you tell us some tips on how to build a healthy and balanced practice session?

Cory Barger: Be kind to yourself. Seriously. This is the most impactful thing in my opinion. Practice is where we do most of our work, and if we use it to torture ourselves that is going to affect every aspect of our lives. Learn how to give yourself feedback that does not include “good” or “bad” — no judgment, just facts. “I played that run really badly” does not help you. “I need to play fa on beat 3 instead of sol” gives you something specific to look for and doesn’t imply anything about you.

L.Park: Self-compassion is not a subject often talked about, when did you first learn to be kind to yourself and what advice would you give to young music students?

Cory Barger: I learned quite late in life — it’s probably an ongoing lesson, because there are situations where I have no problem being compassionate to myself and others where I sound so cruel. I struggled with what I thought was depression for most of my adult life— it turns out it was undiagnosed ADHD.

That was a pivotal moment for me because suddenly I instantly had more compassion for myself. I wish I could have had compassion for myself before, but it took a major shift in how I saw myself for it to happen.

I would tell young students that what you think you can achieve if you’re mean to yourself is just the tip of the iceberg. You will accomplish so much more if you are compassionate. Shame and fear have been motivating us for so long, and we don’t have to live like that any more.

L.Park: Why, in your opinion, is it so tough for us to separate our artistic value and our human value?

Cory Barger: I think the built-in social life we sometimes get in school ensembles is generally great but it can get a bit dehumanizing at times if we see each other as the instrument we play or as how we are useful instead of people first. Also, so many of our impactful emotional experiences can be brought about through performing and listening to music so it becomes a deep part of our identity.

L.Park: How do you build self-discipline without making it toxic?

Cory Barger: Examine your motives. What does self-discipline mean, and what should it look like? Your answers to those questions might show you that you have expectations around what discipline will show about you. Notice if it is because you want to prove yourself, or to win an audition, or get someone’s approval (or all of those at once). Why is discipline necessary? What would you do without it? Is it a weapon to get you to behave in a way that you think you “should”?

L.Park: Finally, what is one thing you wished institutions would change?

Cory Barger: STOP HIRING AND COVERING FOR ABUSERS.

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