“If you can’t do it slowly, what makes you think you CAN DO IT FAST?!”
. . . a lesson too often repeated by Dr. Charles West and I’m sure we’ve all heard plenty enough. I’m shocked how long it took for this to “click” and even more shocked how this had so much of an impact on my weight-loss progress.
As a second semester freshman in the music department at VCU, I left the low-brass studio and joined Dr. West’s studio as a clarinet major. I hardly knew what it meant to be a REAL clarinetist. The facility one must have with the instrument was way past my comprehension so in Master Class I just thought EVERYONE sounded amazing; so good that I would have to work my butt off to catch up. I was at the bottom of the studio and I knew it. I was so used to being the star trombonist without having to put much effort into my playing at all. It was surely a gift. The only thing I wanted was to be in the eye of positive attention like some of the others who could play really fast technical pieces. All I could barely manage were the Five Bagatelles by Gerald Finzi, which are not on a very high level of difficulty.
So, how would you expect I tried to learn my etudes and pieces? TOO FAST! I was in such a hurry and in such a rush to be considered as “good” that I didn’t pay enough attention to the basics and getting a good grasp on technique. Sure, I managed to learn a lot of really difficult pieces over this past year and a half, but the performances of my pieces were not up to par. I couldn’t hold on to my technique and I was playing sloppily. I “didn’t have time in my practice” for my Jean-Jean Vade-Mecum DAILY exercises or the Carl Baermann DAILY exercises which, as I have now learned, really give a player a firm handle on proper finger motion. It’s so much easier now to glance at a run and feel that my fingers already know that it’s just a C# minor arpeggio or a diminished 7th… or whatever. I “didn’t have time” because it took me SO MUCH LONGER to learn the repertoire I was working on because I didn’t have a SOLID foundation.
See, I’ve been meeting with a nutritionist and a psychologist and reading up on being healthy and managing my weight. I had this dialogue with my counselor once: “Hey, guess what!” “What’s that?” she asked. “I’ve lost about 10 pounds since the last time we met!” “. . .” she paused with concern, “that was last week sometime. . .” and I smiled charmingly. After a counseling session about my body image issues we came to the conclusion that I was losing weight too fast from exercise and ignoring my nutrition (my foundation) and it was causing symptoms of muscular atrophy, depression, and my mind just wasn’t in the same place as my lighter body. I still had the brain of a 250 lb. man in the body of a 50 lb lighter man. I used what I have learned from Dr. West about allowing my brain to catch up with my fast fingers by practicing slowly and actually APPLIED these skills to my exercise and diet. My nutrition has improved, I haven’t been losing weight quite AS fast (however still fast) but I’m focusing on my nutrition more and I’m happy. Also, I’ve been losing weight even FASTER now because my body is healthy and willing to give up some calories. My mind is in a good place and at 190 lbs I feel and look much happier. (Going for a beach-appropriate body by the end of June!)
The moral of this post is that you have to start off slowly whether you feel you can go faster or not to BUILD A FOUDATION. Be it music or weight loss or learning to drive a manual vehicle, you’re setting yourself up for failure by falling under the illusion that speed is skill.
