Spurred by the discussion of Kata at QCon London, and reminded by a nice tribute to Pablo Casals in the Guardian this weekend, some thoughts on practice in music and software development. To start with, here’s Casals: when asked why, at the age of 93, he still practiced for three hours each day, he replied:

“I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”

This says much the same (though in the characteristically pithy way that comes with age and extreme eminence) as Pat Metheny notes in his commencement address to the Berklee School of Music class of ‘96. It’s worth quoting at length, because it says a great deal about a great musician’s combination of focus and humility:

…[a]s much as I can stand here and claim to be a successful player, with Grammy awards and winning polls and now honorary degrees and all that stuff; one very fundamental thing has not changed, and I realized that it will never change, and that is this–that the main thing in my life, even as I stand here right now, right this second, is that I really need to go home and practice.

Saying this, of course, is obvious. We all need to practice and improve, and we will all need to practice and improve. But I do think that when I was younger, there would be a day when I would sort of “get it”, and that everything would be cool, and I would have arrived at that promised land of being a great musician and I would just be. And I can see now, that that is never going to happen.

The thing for me, and the good news, is I realize that for whatever benefits I’ve gotten from being a musician in a material sense, or in the form of recognition, the fundamental reward that I still get the most satisfaction from, is the process of what being a musician is. It is that need and desire to want to go home and practice that’s the coolest thing. The part where you start with nothing, have a musical idea or vision or aspiration, and through discipline and organization and preparation, and especially inspiration, you finally end up with the capacity to do something that you didn’t know you could do.

My music practice has settled into a structure as follows. Technical warm up, then studies, then work on repertoire. The technical warm-up varies in detail, but always I work to a principle of overlapping patterns: for example something I’ll often do is play a chromatic scale up a single string: using a 3-finger pattern in the left hand (0234-shift-234-shift…) up to the 15th fret and down again, with a 4-finger pattern in the right hand (i m a m, i m i a or i a m a), but phrased in groups of 5:

What I want to focus on here isn’t this sort of practice, though, but the next set: studies. People often associate this with playing fast, elaborate, technically challenging stuff, but there’s another strand to study play, which is to play the simplest things with complete mindfulness. There’s a good description of this in Gleen Kurtz’s book Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, talking about a tiny, simple but beautiful étude by Fernando Sor (Op 60, no. 16):

It’s not a piece guitarists will rush to put into a programme (though it’s a sweet encore): as with a lot of Sor’s simpler music it has something of the atmosphere of late Mozart about it. The challenge in its use as a study is to be in a state of mind and body in which you play it perfectly: no squeaks, no fluffs, none of the annoying little accidents that remind you that the guitar is a physical object being played in a physical world by an imperfect body. My challenge in this piece, my bugbear which means I play it again and again until it’s right, comes between bar 15 and 16 - the C on the fifth string (played with left hand 3) moves down to a B (2 or 1), but unless you take that finger off cleanly, there’s a tiny scratch as the tip of the finger slides momentarily against the string.

I talk about this in detail because it seems to me that something is misunderstood in the parallels people draw between musical practice, martial arts practice and coding practice. I’m not experienced enough in martial arts to make a judgement (two years of Judo at school, a long time ago…), but the core element of practice in music, and it seems to me in martial arts katas, is to focus concentration on recalcitrant physicality. Bodies are physical, continuous, software is just so damned discrete. I can’t, for example, imagine getting the same benefit, and certainly not the same pleasure, from warming up with the Bowling Game Kata every day for twenty years, as I do by playing the simplest Sor, Bach, and other studies (Casals played movements from the Bach cello suites every day for all his playing life. “Beginning to notice some improvement…”). Learning the refactoring shortcuts in Eclipse or IntelliJ by repeated practice is one thing (after me: alt-cmd-l, alt-cmd-m, alt-cmd-i), internalizing emergent patterns of design is another, but these bears as much relationship to mastery in music (and I’ll contend, in martial arts) as getting a high score on Guitar Hero does to playing a real instrument.