Effortless Mastery by Kenny Werner addresses an often-neglected area of musical study: your mental well-being as a musician and as a person. Namely, Werner focuses on the ego and how it often keeps us from becoming the masterful musicians we can be. Werner claims that we are already masters, but we limit ourselves with constant fear-based listening, playing, and practicing. This book is about helping you to become fearless, and “Liberating the Master Within” (which is the subtitle of the book).
Some of this might sound a little new-agey, and Werner is willing to admit as much, but there are so many truths to be found in this book that you already know to be true, conveniently presented in one place to point out how we limit ourselves as musicians by allowing our egos to play too meddling a role in our playing, and how to begin to surrender our egos and play from a completely relaxed, fearless, loving place, a place that loves every note you play unconditionally, before you’ve even played it.
There are two things in this book in particular that helped me tremendously: one of them metaphysical, the other highly practical. The metaphysical lesson was to divorce my musical technique from my sense of value as a human being. Too often, we punish ourselves emotionally because we didn’t play something as well as we would have liked to. The second lesson is Werner’s practice diamond. To briefly present it, there are four points to practicing:
1) Play effortlessly
2) Play perfectly
3) Play fast
4) Play the whole piece
There are two rules: You can only do three of these things at once when practicing (if you can do all four on a given piece, you have mastered that piece), and you must always observe point 1.
I use this practice diamond in my own practice and in teaching, and it has certainly helped me develop my technique a great deal.
The book also comes with a CD of meditations for the musician to help with the metaphysical aspect of things. You might be incredulous about such things, unwilling to let go of your fear-based obsessions, but I highly recommend at least giving it a try and seeing the results. You don’t have to buy in to the spiritual journey, but you should definitely give what he’s saying a non-judgmental read and try some of the things he’s suggesting to see if it helps you in your relationship with music.
more articles by Brien Henderson
- Anatomy of the Blues Scale
- A Great Site for Old Music
- Saxes: Work Your Pinkies!, part 1
- Spice Things Up With The Tritone Sub
- Writing Your Own Music: How To Get Started
- Intro to chords in Jazz
- Subdivide. It Pays Off
June 27th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Good advice. Its a forgotten point by most students that playing well is as much mental as it is physical.